Adrift in the Slow Lane of Learning
popecenter.org
popecenter.org
I understand the value of taking a higher-level course with a world-class expert in the subject, but calculus for poets barely requires a math undergrad to teach adequately.
Another sign that disruption in education is coming...
Imagine being 19 years old and already identifying yourself as a poet. Maybe you spend your time writing love poems (ha ha, cliché right?), after all you'd be surprised how much something like this can be attractive. Imagine being this poet and going to a school that allows you to be taught by a world-class mathematician without any requirements other than sheer tenacity and zeal. I admit the first thing that popped in my head is that a poet might be one of the most enthused in such a situation.
After all, who is anyone to trivialize the pursuit of knowledge from motivated students who are by their very nature yet to be categorized or to have created a deep identity. It's like so many universities are swaying towards vocational training. No, I'm not making fun here, vocational schools have their uses, but one of the great things of a higher-education is the continuance of encountering things that you wouldn't otherwise find without the help of someone who knows the terrain.
Just imagine.
One argument for taking courses from faculty active in research is that they can incorporate recent advances in their fields into the curriculum. Undergraduate calculus does not benefit much, though. It's not like anything taught wasn't known 200 years ago.
I picked on math for poets because classes in those genre often require much one-on-one tutoring, review classes, etc. The professors who ran such courses were often more project manager than teacher. Many teaching assistants were involved, and duties were shared. I could understand having some guest lectures from various faculty members, but burdening them with tutoring some pre-med major on integration techniques doesn't seem like a good use of time.
That's not to say that somebody at the forefront of research (or, for that matter, somebody of "a certain age") can't generate that kind of enthusiasm for his/her subject -- one of the most entertaining and informative lectures I ever saw was one given by Bill Phillips of NIST at the Perimeter Institute on time measurement, cooling and the Bose-Einstein condensate. Nobel Laureate, unapologetic geek, energy and sense of wonder not often seen in the average six-year-old. Gimme a grad student with that kind of unbounded love for the subject over an expert any time.
I like to think that's what I brought to the classroom when I taught, but then I like to think a lot of good things about myself that ain't necessarily so.
http://www.amazon.com/Mathematicians-Survival-Guide-Graduate...
The author, a math professor, points out that a department has to keep up its enrollments to maintain departmental resources, and those resources include funding for more professors. He tells the story of one state university system that had a main math department in university's main college of arts and sciences (whatever the exact name was) and a set of first-year calculus courses for forestry majors taught by the School of Forestry. By university rules, all first-year calculus courses were deemed equivalent, and by reputation of the courses reported by students, the calculus courses in the Forestry School were the easiest calculus courses to pass. So of course over time the enrollments in the calculus courses for forestry students increased quite a lot, including many students who were not majoring in forestry. That kept the main math department from having the enrollments necessary to justify hiring more junior professors, more secretaries and graduate students, and so forth.
Another example he gives is of a different university where a department's offerings to non-major students were so irrelevant to their needs that a different department took over teaching those courses. In some state university, the engineering school wanted engineering majors to be able to take courses in Japanese to learn to read technical documents, but the Department of Asian Languages insisted on teaching courses in reading medieval poetry and the like. So the engineering school hired its own instructors of Japanese, with no tenure track, and taught its desired Japanese courses in-house, again denying the Department of East Asian Languages a chance to grow and to gain more resources.
University departments, unless they are very well endowed by a specific endowment, have to compete for resources by appearing to meet student needs. Students may not always take a long term view of what their own needs are for a good education, but enrollments matter in allocating resources.
So you're saying the college/department doesn't get a percentage of the student tuition for each student taking a class in the department?
This just makes college a little bit more like real life. You get out of it what you choose. "Beer and circus" or books and computers? Your choice. Less competition for those of us who choose, in college or in business, to turn lemons into lemonade.
Plus, much of education is funded by the government (public to a large extent, but also the research grants and whatnot to the privates can't be dismissed), and I simply don't want to pay for people to waste away 4 years in a glamorized high school. I'm all for scholarships and funding for students and schools that take it seriously, but not this junk.