trunks2k

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind my teachers, a few I like a lot. Some of them I don't like and that is usually because I either find some trait of theirs very annoying or I think the material they are trying to teach is BS. And almost all of my TA's I liked, minus one or two.

I think the biggest problem in colleges is language barriers. One prof/TA may be absolutely brilliant and be a terrific teacher, but if he or she can't speak english fluently enough to be able to communicate with the class, then it's pointless. This hasn't been a problem with profs yet for me, but it is when it comes to TA's. One Bio TA of mine was from Hong Kong, brilliant girl and very nice, but she had a very hard time communicating clearly so it class was much more difficult than it had to be. A CS TA of mine was completely worthless because she could barely speak a word of english, so any time we had a problem, we ended up having to spend a bunch of time figuring it out for ourselves, whereas we could have saved ourselves hours of work by just having a TA who could talk to us.

This Bio teacher I complain about is a rare exception of teachers that I actually loathe.

Clutch

Eh?

Any reason for believing this, or did it just come to you in a dream?

never been there

Broken English is the international language of academe. If it's your first language, just cringe and consider yourself lucky that you didn't have to learn it before going to university. To be fair to the students, usually when someone complains about about a prof's language abilities there's most everything else wrong as well.

As for dumb prof stories, we had an engineering prof who corrected overheads with Liquid Paper (tm) and couldn't figure out why all we saw on the screen was a blob.

I, on the other hand, can claim to have had other TAs' students show up to my sessions and office hours even though they still had to attend their assigned sections to write the quizzes.

never been there

Hey Bree, now I'm just curious. In which educational system did you attend primary and secondary school? Many less principled people would just play the "discrimination card" against the prof by accusing her of not liking people from place X.

I couldn't, of course, since I was born in the UK and we're all colonialists and oppressors.

Loren Pechtel

Unfortunately, professors are often worthy of cringing.

I would say that in general I knew more than my teacher in the various computer classes I took.

Once, the next semester the teacher even asked me to subsistute for one of his classes for the prior semester! (Actually, understandable--there was nobody else there qualified.) I had a conflicting class and couldn't do it. Before I realized the conflict I was debating about it--from a technical standpoint I certainly knew enough. Whether I could have done a competent job in front of the class I'm not sure. Had it been done as a Q&A session I'm sure I could have handled it. For all practical purposes I did teach the class to one student, actually. I was working as a lab assistant there. The teacher knew his material but had a teaching style that was problematic for students who wouldn't stand up to him. One woman definitely fell into this category and had all sorts of trouble with the class until she discovered she could ask me questions. I probably spent 3 hours/week with her, but the lab was empty enough in those hours that I could.

Loren Pechtel

Physics 116. 3 TA's, one good, one ok, one poor and with barely understandable English. At first the teacher didn't enforce which students got which TA, he got upset when after a week it was split about 70/30/0%!

Loren Pechtel

Computer Literacy for teachers. The worst group I ever saw in the lab.

1) They had at least 10 times the problems of the average students.

2) They were utterly unwilling to listen to us mere lab assistants--we were just students after all! Never mind that all of us on duty then were the top guys and actually far more able to answer their questions than the teacher--we had seen the mistakes people made a million times and could generally tell exactly what they had done wrong based on the erroneous results. They would completely ignore us and wait for the horrendously overworked teacher.
He, however, knew our experience and was quite willing to listen. When he would unquestioningly believe us I thought a couple of the teachers in there would have a heart attack. A few specifically didn't want him to pay attention to us, they felt he was wasting their time in acting on our diagnosis of the situation.
A total comedy--we would figure out the problem by looking over their shoulder, when the teacher got there we told him what was going on and then went looking for other stuck teachers. Yet the teachers never got the notion that we knew anything.

Bree

My education is all screwed up.

From age 4-10 I sat classes with my peers for the classes labelled science and social studies and then was taken to the high school for tutoring. I studied the humanities and British literature almost exclusively in grades 6-8 - I had a typing class and a few physical science classes. When I got to high school, I completely immersed myself in the study of British literature and the fine arts - the only non-arts classs I took were two math courses, an anatomy/phys class at the local university, a chemistry class, and a journalism internship. Basically, my school district let me slip through the system and allowed me to create a magnet program within a public school.

I'm coming to understand that I was completely unprepared for "real" college. I'm used to thinking things through on my own. I was always handed something to work thorough on my own, instead having to swallow someone else's interpretation and spit it back out on a test.

Anyway, my professor wrote me back and said that rather than drag this "out in front of herr director" (maybe I should tell her I don't understand what she means, since this isn't Germany) she would accept all further papers with my own spelling and grammar. However, she was quick to remind me that when in Rome, one must do as the Romans do to avoid "standing out" and "making a scene" - blah blah blah.

pz

"Often"?
I would have to say that my experience is completely different. When I was in college, all of my professors were clearly more competent than their students. Now that I'm on the other side of the lectern, I am confident that all of my colleagues are more competent than the students. I've also known students who brag about knowing more than the professors, but so far they've always turned out to be people who are so ignorant that they are ignorant about the magnitude of their own ignorance.

I have heard a few horror stories about lousy professors -- there was apparently one at my u a few years before I got here who was a major boob who blew off students -- but they are very much in the rare minority.

Computer science may be a different story. I know that hiring in CS departments is a painful struggle because good people can get paid so much more in industry than they can in academia.

pz

Have you considered transferring to another university? I happen to know of a perfectly lovely public liberal arts university just one state to the west of you, where we actually encourage students to think for themselves, and where the faculty value the art of teaching very highly.