So I’m listening to ‘Work with Marty Nemko’ on KALW (91.7) and he just accused college professors who are good at research but not temperamentally suited to good teaching of being immoral for taking jobs at universities. This is an utterly ridiculous claim. As the vast majority of research jobs are exactly such university jobs this implies that we would be better off with happy calculus students than our cutting edge research.

Still he definitely has a point when he says that research and teaching are very different skill sets. The question is whether it makes sense to ask (as he does) for separate tracks for teaching and research. My personal interest is clearly to encourage such a division. We would still have to employee researchers in some fashion and if we freed them from the annoyance of teaching that would be great.

However, I think this notion comes from an overly narrow notion of what good teaching constitutes. There is good teaching like we might want in high school which grabs the average student’s interest and helps them learn some simple set of skills that will help them in the real world. There is also teaching which has the potential to create a productive engineer, scientist or other highly skilled profession. The problem is (most) of the people with the skill set to do the first sort of teaching are utterly incapable of doing the second sort of teaching.

For instance look at what happens to people who are genuienly gifted or interested in math/science in high school. They are repeatedly frustrated and turned off by teachers who, while quite good at teaching to the average student, don’t understand enough of the subject to answer the interesting questions. While this conflict could be reduced by finding teachers who are skilled in both research and marketing their subject to the average student even in this magical world of perfect teachers there would be tension between the two goals. Good teaching for the casual learner is about taking the subject and transforming it via metaphor to something they already understand. Good teaching for the aspiring researcher is about teaching the student to think in a different way.

A perfect example is the epsilon-delta definition of the derivative. If one is teaching casual students insisting on a symbolic understand of this definition is about the worst thing one can do, instead one wants to give vague pictorial understanding. On the other hand for the aspiring mathematician the goal is to banish, or at least explain, the vague pictorial understanding in terms of the formal definition.

The problem of teaching in universities is partially illusory and partially a result of an unclear division between research universities and glorified versions of DeVry.

The apparent but non-existent problem of teaching arises when students who are pre-law or pre-med are (effectively) required to take calculus courses. It then appears that they are being poorly taught because they have no intention of becoming researchers in mathematics but are taught by professors selected for their ability to research and teach real understanding not practical calculus skills. The reason this is only a matter of appearance is that learning calculus really has nothing to do with why they are being made to take the course.

Frequently courses like calculus are required for no other reason that to weed out students who aren’t going to be able to hack it. For this purpose all that matters is the uniformity of teaching in the class. While their are obviously a few outliers (the profs who try to make them learn it all rigorously) for the most part the different teachers are equivalent and that’s all that matters. To some extent what these students are learning is how to take classes and study material they aren’t excited about and don’t have a teacher who makes it interesting or seem relevant to their lives. If these students had the sort of super teachers you see in ‘Stand and Deliver’ it would defeat the whole purpose of these weeder classes.

I think there is a good argument that we shouldn’t have these sorts of fake requirements that exist for no other reason than to be hard. I definitely think many breadth requirements exist for no other reason than show and should be revised either to demand real understanding or clearly be nontechnical survey classes. Unfortunately all too often the continued warnings about our lack of math/science skill are answered by useless requirements for students to solve calculus problems without understanding that they will never use. However, it isn’t justified to criticize university profs for not teaching well when there isn’t actually any content the students are really supposed to learn.

The second issue is more of a real problem. Unfortunately universities no longer only educate the intellectual/academic class they serve as general training for the job market. Partially this is just the effect I mentioned above, university graduation is just a proxy for work ethic, smarts and knowing the right social behaviors. To this extent it doesn’t matter how good the teaching is as long as it is relatively uniform, and it is nearly impossible to achieve uniformly excellent teachers. However, there is also a sizable fraction of students who are using university to receive practical training in applied careers.

These are the students who need to learn to work in a lab to be a DNA/forensic technician but don’t need a deep understanding of the chemistry. Or they are elementary/HS teachers who need to learn how to present the material but can’t be expected to really understand it. Or they are electronic technicians who need to be able to solder or maybe use mathematica to solve some fixed set of equations but once again need no deep understanding. The problem here is that these students would be best served by going to a school/program that focused on doing technical training but the low status of these programs guarantees such a degree is evidence of poor ability.

To deal with this problem the distinction between research universities and other schools needs to be made much more clear, not only to the professors but the students as well. You shouldn’t have schools like University of Illinois at Chicago which hires serious mathematicians for their department even though their undergraduate student base is pretty clearly on the technical end. I get the feeling that this is much more similar to what happens in the UK where students are tracked far earlier but I’ll wait for Adam to chime in on this.

Unfortunately I’m not sure such a change would be possible of even desirable. It may not be possible because we put greater status on real academic understanding and some people who can’t hack that are always going to want to go to the half-assed research schools. It may not be desirable because I suspect the net effect of such a distinction would be to shift nearly all the monetary support to the research schools.

So in the story of the student who shot his principal to death is making its rounds in the news. Now obviously shooting your principal is not only wrong but just plain stupid. However, at least in this situation why it happened is extremely understandable.

Apparently Erik Hainstock, the shooter, was the victim of frequent harassment (people rubbing up against him calling him fag etc..). He complained about this treatment to the teachers and authorities who appear to have done nothing, or next to nothing. Yet despite failing to enforce discipline on a serious matter of harassment the same people made sure to enforce the rules and give him an in class suspension when he was caught with tobacco. Someone in this situation really is totally fucked and without options. Of course it’s just highschool and it will pass but we all know that it doesn’t feel like that in highschool.

The negligent inability of teachers to deal with situations like this is perfectly illustrated in the comment that his teacher Nowak made to the news, “He wasn’t picked on. He was the one who would have picked on people.” Of course his friend when interviewed was aware that Erik was picked on a lot as well as admitting that he did a fair bit of harrassing himself. But this is exactly the psychological profile one expects from someone who is harrassed. Basic competancy for school teachers, especially special ed teachers, should include knowing that the common reaction to being picked on is to make yourself feel better by going and picking on others.

Disgustingly Erik threw a stapler at his teacher just two weeks before, obviously indicating something was wrong, and apparently they just put him back into the same class. Not doing cruel idiotic things like this should be basic training for teachers and basic policy in our schools.

Though not right it is emminently understandable why someone, especially someone who had been put in special ed would fell something like this was their only option. Hell if I hadn’t been crazy smart and come from a family where college was assumed or slightly more vengefull I could see myself having done this sort of thing.

What really disgusts me about these situations is the failure of most people to see the strong mitigating circumstances in situations like this. I mean imagine it was a woman being sexually harrassed about her weight (jokes about big sexy or something) and her supivisors did nothing to fix it while disciplining her for minor issues. Not only would the company be sued people would be horrified at their immoral behavior and ultimately changes would be made to fix it. Certainly no one would be pointing out that she sometimes gossiped about women being fat so she couldn’t be the victim. Or imagine he really was gay, the fact like many gay guys he mocked some people for being really flaming wouldn’t be seen as a reasonable response to his harassment.

This is also why I have big qualms about special protections for certain sorts of harassment (sexual harassment, sexual orientation harrasment). Ultimately harassment is harassment and it all hurts for the same reasons. It doesn’t hurt any more because you are a member of a group who is commonly victimized. Yet unfortunatly it sometimes seems like these special harassment protections soak up the sympathy and the willingness to fix the problem. If something can be shoehorned into one of these salient categories great if not then people don’t care so much.

By the time this posts I should have finished grading my students papers. The statements the professor asked the students to comment about indirectly involved Leibniz and other’s views about god. Luckily for me in this assignment the students were asked to comment about how the Logical Positivists would have viewed the statements. Thus I could easily discard all significant meanderings on god as irrelevant.

However, it made me wonder how I would grade a paper where statements about god could legitimately be brought into the discussion. On the one hand academic integrity would demand that I grade all students fairly based on the quality of their arguments. On the other hand many objectively flawed positions and arguments about god lie at the heart of popular belief systems. How would it be possible to rectify academic fairness and true religious neutrality with the pragmatic expectations people have not to be graded down on the basis of their belief system? (more…)