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Comment by brutus1213 | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure how much is sarcasm and how much is in earnest. I went to a highly ranked school where professors did the bozo act of assigning unsolved problems to assignments. And some of these individuals had no business teaching (saying this as someone who turned into research scientist and is mid-career). Teaching does not have to be throwing someone into the deep end and laughing to see who manages to swim out and survive. Now that Internet video courses are prevalent, I am astounded by the quality instruction offered by gem-like instructors at lesser institutions. Key in my mind is attitude. Are they treating the students like adults and peers or as children? While students in University should not be spoon-fed, the average top tier University student in STEM deserves better.

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The article hints at this, but peers and cultural values (aka an ambient expectation that everyone can do x, y & z) may be more important in pedagogy than the quality of instruction.

(Of course, both would be better...)

All professors can be replaced by YouTube videos. Researchers are simply not teachers nor provide anything particularly special unless it's very specific and the class is already experienced in the related field.

Unfortunately we are afraid of sane government reform. While the rest of the world is running circles around the U.S. in producing competent graduates we're putting federal funds towards middle aged researchers that can't survive in the private industry.

> I am astounded by the quality instruction offered by gem-like instructors at lesser institutions

Can you share your top-5 or top-k?

Would love to find some new courses to learn.

As a working professional, that is made much easier when the instructor is fantastical.

The point (don't remember which of the 10) of "wow your proposed courses are a lot harder than when I did undergrad" combined with "hahahaha my problem sets are so hard they turn into papers" portrays MIT as some exponentially increasing hazing.

OF COURSE this boomer had more opportunity, less stress, lower tuition, and now self-congratulates himself for abusing the next generation.

And OF COURSE his conclusion is "major in my major (math)", even though he explains elsewhere how unable MIT grads are at dealing with the "real world". Because he's a narcissistic boomer living in an ivory tower built after WW2 had burned down all the other ivory towers.

To clarify the chronology and background here: Rota was born in 1932, and starting teaching at MIT in 1959. He died in 1999.

Rota was not a boomer; he taught the boomers (and the succeeding generation). The students he is talking about here are the young boomers-to-be. This page is dated 1997 but it reads like a reprint of something written much earlier. I was an undergraduate at Caltech in 1968-72 and this sounds similar to the faculty, students, and workload there at that time.

Regarding WW2, Rota was a child in Italy during the war until his family fled in 1945 to escape the fascists. He reached the US in 1950 via Switzerland and Ecuador [1]. Not really a pampered boomer upbringing.

1. http://tech.mit.edu/V119/N21/21rota.21n.html

> Rota was not a boomer; he taught the boomers (and the succeeding generation)

And the preceding one (if he started teaching at MIT in '59, Boomers were still in their early teens at most.)

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