Here in Holland the educational system has been changed a bit because students had to finish their studies faster. This has led to more structured courses where students have to hand in assignments on time etc. (a bit like the US system). This has had a very negative impact on the performance of students. Even though more students finish their studies on time, their level is much lower than it used to be.

What happens is that the more intelligent students are not given the freedom to study by themselves and the less intelligent ones don’t learn to study for themselves.

And if you look at the situation in the US, you see that what they learn in their first year is the same as what high school students here know when they graduate. Some time ago, Clifford posted here about a new first year physics class he is teaching. I.m.o. this class should be taught to 15 year olds, not to 18 year old university students.

Since this may have been directed at me, let me deconstruct this statement a bit.

I had in mind what JustAnotherInfidel wrote about.

“Jim seems to hold the view that university students are young fragile minds who are willingly and consciously engaged in a process upon which their very lives depend.”

I don’t see them as young, fragile minds. However, I definately see them engaged in a process that in many ways the rest of their lives depends on. Additionally, they are paying the instructors and the University to help them: so they are customers too, in a relationship that is fundamentally a helping relationship. (Teaching being a form of helping.)

The poor levels of instruction at the University that I attend leads many students to abandon their dreams. That is bad: certainly it is not what the students is paying for, and it is destructive to the student’s life.

As a suggestion, I would recommend that Universities simply state that they do not hold their instructors to any educational standards. That job performance is measured on research and not teaching. This would help the customer, the students, more effectively decide what schools to attend: they can know what they are purchasing.

Since this may have been directed at me, let me deconstruct this statement a bit. Jim seems to hold the view that university students are young fragile minds who are willingly and consciously engaged in a process upon which their very lives depend. I take teaching beyond seriously if by “seriously” Jim means some form of formalized pedagogical structuring of which he personally approves. I taught (now retired) in universities, first in ethnic studies, then in School of Ed. I am a School of Ed type, and the test i constructed, that seems so offensive to Jim, as designed by a brilliant education educator decades ago, for the very purpose of getting new young teachers to understand that their own future students will not, in all likelihood, follow their given directions. Since i am talking about teaching teachers and not about teaching k-12 curricula i see the process very differently. And i provided my examples above from that experience.

I do however agree to some extent with Jim in regard to the capacity of university professors to provide successful pedagogical performances. I tried for years to convince Education departments to provide teaching workshops as part of doctoral work for the other departments. Ph.D. candidates need to have been exposed to the concepts and philosophical underpinnings of good teaching. The centuries of assumption that simply by attaining a doctorate and crafting numerous papers and texts for voluminous publication bears little, if anything at all to teaching. Yet we go on and on with the process. Universities with large endowments can afford to hire better teachers through searching across other less financially enriched institutions, gleening the creme de la creme. This isn’t the best we can do.

The student skills necessary for university success, such as critical thinking and enhanced reading comprehension (and a dozen absolutely necessary others), are learned at much earlier ages than the last couple of years of high school. There is research that has demonstrated that some of these student and study skills (these are two very different things) are linked to infancy and early childhood reading. The problem in our culture is that many of the university students’ k-12 teachers had neither the extensive requisite training nor realistically the extra time to facilitate the growth of these skills. If i wanted future teachers to keep teaching like they were taught, i certainly would have never provided my students with a quiz that challenged their sense of process. Paying attention is fundamental, more so than critical thinking, yet it is for the most part a skill savored by a few and ignored by the many.

Yeah, there’s stuff like that coming out of School of Ed types; it gets rather strenously ignored in physics, because Ed types wouldn’t know a metric tensor if you smacked them across the head Misner, Thorne & Wheeler. I’m sure they’ve got copious data on how best to teach 1+1=2, but QFT? E&M? It is to laugh. If you don’t know the material inside and out, how could you possibly know how it should be taught?

This is precisely the arrogant, boy’s club attitude that drives people from physics and will have us all out of a job soon. While I have little use for educational buzzwords, I have even less for professors too full of themselves to be concerned with their teaching effectiveness, or even conduct civil discourse. I hope, for all our sakes, that Not a string Theorist is Not a Professor. I am not a School of Ed type. I am a physicist who has read Graviation and How People Learn. It’s not that hard.

Also, sometimes you get landed with a course that is not directly your research area. And then the bad teaching is just a manifestation of your own lack of understanding of the subject matter. For example, when you’re used to deriving electromagnetism from a Lagrangian in a covariant way, try going back to the old noddy way of messing about with E and B fields. And with the right amount of hybris and shoddy preparation you’ll find yourself confused and waffling in front of an even more confused audience. The only remedy is to make sure you really understand the material you teach.

And never ad lib unless you can clearly see the line of reasoning all the way to the end.

IP numbers are always helpful in recognizing the “same ole same ole” people, whose reiteration is might be curtailed toredundancy?

Do they lack, “degrees of freedom?” Oui! Non?:)

It happened to me, I think; I thought probability theory was easy, so when I hit some snaggles and our whiz kid professor wouldn’t take time to help at a level I understood, I had to take 3 exams until I passed. Statistics for the same teacher was easier, since by now I understood I had to learn some of the basics too. Now those two are among my favourite subjects. Who could know?

But students doesn’t all leave their brains behind when they enter the class room. The first few weeks at the university, new town and all, two of my peers entered late studying a map. The teacher, already known for his distaste of late enters, stopped his lecture and waited silently. The student who held the map sensed something was wrong, but thought quickly and laterally. He let his gaze sweep the room while starting to fold the map, and commented “And here we are!”. Even the teacher laughed.

Yeah, there’s stuff like that coming out of School of Ed types; it gets rather strenously ignored in physics, because Ed types wouldn’t know a metric tensor if you smacked them across the head Misner, Thorne & Wheeler. I’m sure they’ve got copious data on how best to teach 1+1=2, but QFT? E&M? It is to laugh. If you don’t know the material inside and out, how could you possibly know how it should be taught?

(yeah, and their attitude is just endemic in business management too: “I may not know anything about supersonic aircraft, but I learned how to manage at a major retailer, so I can manage a defence aerospace company.”)

And while “critical thinking” is, in abstract, a good and useful thing, the term has been taken over by the ignorant as just another buzzword.