Reply to If you think it matters that your kid's classes be taught by a professor: Why?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It's always been so weird to me that we require all these qualifications to teach elementary and secondary school, but anyone in a PhD program with zero teaching pedagogy is apparently qualified to teach a class. I remember that time of my life when all my friends were TAs... Some of them were really good at it and loved it. Others complained about their students all the time. It's two of the latter that are the only ones I know still teaching--they got tenure. Fancy schools, too.

The simple reason I want a full professor teaching *is* simple: I want to have someone be compensated for their labor fairly as it is both morally right and incentives them to do a good job. [/quote]

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. [/quote]

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