If you think it matters that your kid's classes be taught by a professor: Why?
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Anonymous
| Do you want to get a surgery by an experienced doctor or a resident? |
Anonymous
A: How do you think surgeons learn to do surgery? B: The best pediatrician my kids ever had was someone we got because we had a newborn, and the practice was scheduling all those 2-day, 2-week, 4-week appointments in a batch. This guy was new, so his calendar was wide open. He was amazing, even fresh out of residency. Within a few years, he was the least-available ped there. C: Surgery and class discussion are not the same. |
Anonymous
Multiple professors have chimed in. We spent many years in school, and experienced all this! There are good and bad teachers at all levels. More experienced ones are usually better because people learn, and bad ones get filtered out. Also, good research is positively correlated with good teaching. The ability to write and present new research is similar to explaining simpler concepts. Professors often send our kids to SLAC's. Think about Montessori schools. You don't need a college degree to teach 4-year-olds. And the Montessori pedagogy is not essential. Instead, it is important to have well-paid, experienced, and enthusiastic child caretakers. Otherwise, when you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. Finally, many undergrads are clueless. They take courses from anybody based on convenience or easy grading. They end up in huge classes and hide in the back of the lecture hall. As a student, I always found it easy to get hard technical classes. |
Anonymous
I'd argue plenty of professors are NOT "dedicated to teaching". Many are at the university to do research. They hate teaching entry level/lower level undergrad courses and as such, suck at it and don't really care. IN that case, I'd rather have a TA would is working their ass off to teach. Or a "lecturer"---they are there to teach and typically are much better at it. |
Anonymous
At LACs they are indeed dedicated to teaching. |
Anonymous
+1000 Some of my Favorite medical staff are NP or PAs. they spend more time with their patients and actually seem to care/have better bedside manner. And C----surgery is not comparable to teaching a course. Me personally, I'm fine with TAs (as long as they speak English well enough for students to understand---in stem that can be an issues with TAs and profs and has been an issue for decades) or a Lecturer (PHD/MS "prof" who is not on tenure track---their main job is to teach because they love it and are good at it---less focus on research and more on teaching---that's totally fine for Chem 101/102---that material hasn't changed much over time. |
Anonymous
That is very true. Also the case at many mid size universities as well---teaching is valued along with the research. I attended a T10 university, where the math and physics dept was know for having crappy "teaching professors"---as in extremely bad. Picking Calculus courses often meant picking the "lesser of multiple evils". For physics there was one professor where literally, if you could only get into their course, you skipped physics that semester and prayed you got into the "better course next semester". The good prof was a lecturer---not "professor" 35+ years later, she is still a Lecturer at the university and now (thankfully) teaches 95% of the first year Physics courses--she was good then, and they obviously figured out much better to have your Eng students actually learn physics. When I took it her class would have 90-100 students (max size of lecture hall), and the other might have 10-15, poor suckers who had to take the course to stay on track to graduate in 4 years and had no choices left. |
Anonymous
Agree. Each type of instructor has a range of good & not-so-good teachers. It’s not as clear-cut as some posters are claiming. Your kid isn’t necessarily getting a substandard education if he gets an occasional non-tenure-track prof. There are many other variables that college applicants should be considering rather than the % of classes taught by TAs. The quality of food, cleanliness of dorms, amount of drug use, size & convenience of campus, etc. are all probably going to have a bigger impact on your kid’s overall experience than whether intro psych is taught by a tenure-track professor or not. |
Anonymous
For our family, class size is more important and access to professors. Sure Chem 101 can be taught with 200 in lecture and then discussion sections and that works well, but I'd prefer not to have the lecture be 400+. I'd also argue that calculus 101 should not be 200+. I prefer if those courses are taught with 25-40 students. My kids all picked universities where most classes, sans the intro Chem/Bio, are typically 25-50 students. One had a few business classes that were 75-100, but IMO that's okay as you can still "engage" in a class of that size if you choose to and sit in the first 10 rows of lecture. One kid's major is about 30 kids, so majority of their classes from sophomore year onwards will have at most 40-45 students (they get crossover from BME majors with a focus in this major so classes will have 5-10 BME majors sometimes). Same kids for most classes, so it's collaborative. |
Anonymous
Well, except that in the U.S. (unlike in Finland whose students are among the highest performing in the world), most of those who have gone into elementary and secondary school teaching within the last few decades graduated near the bottom of their own undergraduate classes. So yes, attaining certification to teach in public schools involves a lot of red tape, but it's no guarantee of any of the qualities that we'd want all of our elementary and secondary school teachers to have. As for differences in quality between adjuncts and full-time faculty, much depends upon variables specific to a given institution and its context. In NYC, for example, there is no shortage of brilliant, creative dedicated adjunct instructors who are also productive scholars and writers/inventors/artists. In a red state where most people barely graduated from high school, qualified adjuncts will be far and few between. What is likely to be true, however, is that full-time faculty will be able to devote time to undergraduates and their work that many adjuncts won't for the simple reason that the professional and financial security of the former means that they don't have to pick up second jobs and also that their course loads will be reasonable. I teach in the humanities, and there is no question that faculty who teach 40 students per semester will be able to comment more thoroughly on student essays than those who teach twice as many undergraduates in a term. |
Anonymous
| My grad school assistantship included TAing, and it was a disaster for everyone involved. It's not that I didn't care or didn't try, I just sucked knutts at it. Teaching isn't in my blood. I found a curriculum online and went through it in a rote and mechanical fashion. I usually dismissed the class 15-30 minutes early (and never got a single complaint). Before midterms and finals, I held "review sessions" where I pretty much went over the test questions themselves and gave the answers. I would have bee absolutely lost if I'd tried to spice up the material, lead interesting class discussions, or engage in unorthodox but effective teaching methods the way skilled professors do. You might end up with some TAs who are naturally good at teaching. But you'll end up with plenty who are like I was. |
Anonymous
| I've experienced teaching by both, and the depth of research experience of a full professor does not compare to a TA. Who is usually an inexperienced teacher as well. My least favorite part of an Ivy experience was TA instruction. I got little out of it. |
Anonymous
| For 5-20k a class I expect a professor. |
Anonymous
| Something to consider if you're a foyine girl is that TA-taught classes can be E-Z A's b/c alotta them TA's tryna smash! |
Anonymous
| Some of my best teachers in college were grad students! |