

What's the Point of a Professor? - mikemajzoub
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/opinion/sunday/whats-the-point-of-a-professor.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region&region=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region&_r=0

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apdinin
This article seems more reflective of a generational technology gap than an
actual loss of student interest in building relationships with professors. The
author doesn't seem to want to bother leveraging all the wonderful tools
currently available to interact digitally with students beyond the walls of a
classroom or office.

I give my students my phone number and encourage texting. I find that sending
Facebook messages usually gets a quicker response than emails. And, in lieu of
office hours, I prefer Google Hangouts so we can be more flexible with meeting
times. (Yes... I've had many "office hour" sessions at 11:00 at night!)

Contrary to what this article asserts, I've found that digital technologies
bring me closer to my students. Using tools like Facebook Groups, Google Docs,
and whatever course forum software the school is operating on at the time, I
get to expand the classroom well beyond our 2.5 hours per week and create a
sort of 24/7 learning environment.

I wish I could have had those kinds of opportunities as an undergrad.

~~~
iolothebard
Yeah, instead you had to get up off your ass and do some leg work. So you had
to determine whether it was worth your time and the professor's time to do so,
instead of a quick and easy "how do I do this work even though I've put in no
effort to figure it out for myself".

Seemingly there is significant more hand holding of students and they all
expect an A because simply showing up in high school meant they'd get an A.
The entitlement is different now as well.

It's amazing how far my school in particular has fallen in reality while in
perception (god awful rankings) have them higher than ever. It's the typical
perception is more important than reality. However, this is good for students,
because this is exactly my experience in the "real world" as well.

I wouldn't trade my 90s undergrad for the crap kids are getting today. And I
thought it was bad then. Hindsight makes me sad for the meager amount of
actual learning going on today.

~~~
apdinin
I can obviously only speak for my students in terms of willingness to do
legwork, but I don't find this to be the case at all. And just because they
ask me something in an email that they could figure out themselves, I don't
necessarily have to give them the answer.

The opposite is usually the case. I prefer to use their hastily sent digital
questions as teaching opportunities -- opportunities I wouldn't have had if
not for the ease with which they can engage with me. For example, I often
respond to questions that need to be researched elsewhere by reminding
students they have Google, as well as world class libraries.

Like any profession, different professors approach their work in different
ways. How a professor chooses to engages with his or her students isn't the
fault of students. I don't see much value in metaphorically shaking my fist
and lamenting "What's the matter with kids these days? They're overly
entitled! How dare they expect success!"

I, like most professors, am in control of the education I provide. That's my
favorite part about being a professor. (It's definitely not the salary...)

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rifung
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.

~~~
xamuel
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.

~~~
lmitchell
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.)

~~~
rifung
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.

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narrator
The point of a professor is that they will actually tell you you did something
wrong and why what you did was wrong. In the real world, as an adult, you
rarely get that luxury from an expert.

~~~
cbd1984
So if the professor doesn't do that and has TAs to do it for them... then
what?

Designing the course is probably fairly high on the list of reasons, as is
lecturing in a responsive fashion. Both of those are good, valid reasons to
keep a professor on staff.

In addition, there's the fact a professor, being an expert, can shepherd post-
graduate students through the process of becoming professors and doing
independent research in the field.

I'm sure there are reasons I'm missing.

~~~
derrida
> So if the professor doesn't do that and has TAs to do it for them... then
> what?

You're in a feedback loop of incentive caused bias and your own personal hell
if you're not lucky enough to have a personality that's compassionate, caring
and allows people to feel like they can tell you truths intimately because
they care about you.

Or there's Google. FACT: Nobody has ever gotten something wrong from looking
at Google for something. Just see for yourself, Vaccines cause autism.

~~~
cbd1984
Your response is totally non sequitur.

~~~
derrida
ADHD :)

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optimusclimb
Came across this after finishing viewing a lecture on MIT OpenCourseWare.

I graduated a long time ago (from a comparable school, but alas, not MIT), but
still revisit certain subjects from time to time.

Considering the level of interaction I usually had with most professors, it
makes me think:

Perhaps at the undergraduate level, "lectures" should be videos, and treated
just as textbooks - as course material.

Clearly, not all lecturers are created equal. If you take 20 tenured
professors doing research, who all understand some undergraduate level subject
forwards, backwards, and upside down - they won't all be equally good at
presenting it.

So make the lectures another (paid for) source to learn from. Over time,
they'll only get better and better, with feedback. If that happened, there
would still be a need for college as we know it. Students will have questions,
need to do work to understand material, and need feedback (grading) to grow.
They would of course also benefit from working and learning with other
students.

With this model, the best undergraduate college would be the one with the best
TAs/"professors" (ones who did grading and explaining, but that was their
focus.) If you value working with other students of similar intelligence and
motivation levels, perhaps that's where the selectivity/prestigiousness of the
school might come in and provide that (but if you bother to respond, let's not
focus on that bit.)

I think that would make for a much better experience for all. Graduate school
would still exist of course, and I'd imagine more research oriented professors
would be happy to spend more time with their grad level students. Grad
students would still be evaluated for admission to a program based on their
mastery of the undergrad concepts - only under this system they'd at least ALL
have the benefit of being lectured by the best qualified to do so.

Further, it would be far easier for prospective students to evaluate where
they'd spend their four years after high school based on things like
admissions rates from undergrad to top level grad schools, and/or job
placement rates - as these would reflect just how good the TAs/course
administrators were at aiding the students at mastering the subjects.

Perhaps people might respond to me along the lines of, "umm, that's pretty
much what undergrad is right now", but it just wasn't my experience. A
majority (no, not all) of the professors seemed much more interested in their
research, rather than teaching, i.e. burning through powerpoint slides and
jetting.

~~~
eitally
I earned a [mostly] online engineering masters degree a few years ago (in
industrial engineering, from NC State, which I think is generally ranked in
the top 10-15 programs nationally), and I had a great experience. Since I live
near the campus I had the option of attending lectures in person if I wanted
to (they have since changed the policy and distance ed students are distance
only, unless the prof looks the other way), but my feedback to them would be
similar to your idea: provide the lectures themselves as pre-recorded content,
then set aside the actual lecture time to work through and review problems &
questions. This serves to free a couple/few hours a week from the professor's
schedule and dedicate it to student interaction, and it allows the students to
make productive use of their instructional time. As others have noted, being
lectured at for an hour is seldom educational, especially in technical fields.

As an undergrad [at UVA], after my first year I explicitly sought out classes
that had no more than 40-60 students, preferably fewer, just to get more
1:1ish time. That said, a lot of my best learning experiences were in courses
taught by TAs, not research professors.

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Teodolfo
The point of a professor at a research university is to interact with graduate
students. At a teaching college they should be interacting with
undergraduates.

~~~
Perceval
> The point of a professor at a research university is to interact with
> graduate students

lol no—at an R1 university the point of the professor is to publish their own
research. Managing grad students is just another obligation to be avoided when
inconvenient.

~~~
Teodolfo
The grad students do a lot of the professor's own research.

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slvv
This is so interesting, and especially frustrating (for both instructors and
students) because really, most of the time only tenured faculty have the
luxury of pushing back against the norm to really engage with students more
outside of class and go beyond just being graders.

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tdaltonc
At a University the point of a professor is to get grants.

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derrida
What's the point of books?

