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Comment by rifung | Hacker News Reader

I'll have to agree that it's a huge shame students don't interact with their professors more. I think that my interactions with one of my professors influenced me much more than the time I spent in all of my classes.

On the other hand, the current education system doesn't seem to lend itself well to student professor interactions since it seems professors are given tenure based off research and not teaching, not that I necessarily think that's wrong.

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As a former professor the problem is purely time constraints. I loved to talk to my undergraduate students, but when the ratio is hundreds to one it is really hard to make this meaningful. Of course the active discouragement from the administration on spending any time with undergraduates does not help.

The professor can't interact with _all_ their students. It's not uncommon for a prof to have 600+ students. If she interacted with each student just one minute per week, that's at least ten hours a week.

The current system is actually fairly good: profs hold office hours, and motivated students self-select for prof-student interaction.

Also, when a TA does the student interaction instead, then both parties benefit: the TA benefits from basic practice explaining concepts to students etc.

I would say that's a problem with the system if it doesn't allow for a professor to have those interactions with at least a majority of their students. And the system definitely does have that problem. (Source: 100+ students in all of my third year classes. Maybe it's just my school's system, but I don't think so.)

Its only a problem if the professor can't interact with all the students that actually want to interact though. I also had 100+ students in some upper division courses but I doubt more than 10 cared to interact with any given professor. Most were merely concerned with their grades.

I didn't mean to imply that a professor should necessarily interact with all his or her students. I was more thinking of how I've seen many professors who obviously did not want to interact with their students because they wanted to focus on their research, and seeing as the current system appears to not punish this behavior, it is suboptimal in a teaching environment.

I think the system is fine in terms of not forcing all students to interact with their professors as that would lead to very shallow relationships. After all, many students go to college just to put it on their resume and help them land a job.

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