Reply to No financial aid for middle class at public college???

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "No financial aid for middle class at public college???"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]"First year classes at Harvard and MIT are taught by faculty members.

Be careful what you wish for. My daughter is a 2nd year professor at one of the Ivies and she doesn't care about teaching first year classes. She spends all of her times doing research and teaching first year classes is, in her words, a distraction. All of her colleagues think the same way.

You can't provide a quality education if you think teaching first year classes is a distraction.

[b]Harvard specifically has freshman seminars taught by faculty. All freshman are encouraged to take one a semester.[/b] MIT has older and more established faculty teach. The younger faculty are often not as strong pedagogically.

The point is, people shouldn't spread rumors about elite schools."

There seems to be spreading of rumors on both sides.  This is DCUM after all.

One faculty taught seminar per semester would seem to support the idea that 3 or 4 classes per semester at Harvard are taught be TAs.

I don't think that TAs teach that much at Harvard but I do think Ivies and MIT and similar schools do use TAs for teaching more than many would admit.

But we also have to slice and dice what that means.  Often in huge classes there are "teaching" faculty who don't have research.  Is that better or worse?  Teaching faculty are chosen for their teaching ability.

But huge is almost never ideal for the student's point of view.  Then "discussion or homework review" sections are taught by TAs.  These TAs are often more approachable and can have more offices hours than a professor.

I think the trend toward online courses where students watch videos of lectures and take tests with randomly generated questions and a student's only in person contact is at a "help center" is more worrisome.

I don't know how often the online model occurs at top level schools.  Does anyone know?  Just like TA's, I doubt it is zero and maybe there are classes it works well.

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics