<p>My dad has been a department chair in the past at a top research university (you can guess which one from my screen name, probably!), and he taught undergraduate courses at the same time - including an introductory one for freshmen. I had him for three classes in undergrad and grad school - he was pretty good, lol! His interaction with students is his first love - that’s why he’s still going strong as a prof, at age 74.</p>
<p>“I had department chairs teaching me, at a top research university.”</p>
<p>As a freshman? </p>
<p>MaineLH - that’s wonderful but in my experience attending three universities I believe that is very rare. </p>
<p>Mini, I TA’d at Chicago, also. I apologize, retroactively, to all my students.</p>
<p>If by “teaching an introductory course for freshmen” you mean standing in front of several hundred people and lecturing, that does not compare with teaching a class of 20-30 freshmen, which is common for a full professor at a LAC. Lecturing isn’t teaching.</p>
<p>At the college where my Dad taught for 32 years, there was (at that time) a required freshman multidisciplinary course in Western Civilization. Each section was taught by one of the most experienced professors at the school - including some from the history, English, philosophy, physics(!), and religion departments (and perhaps others, this was a long time ago).</p>
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<p>I disagree. It can be, depending on the skill of the instructor.</p>
<p>Being taught by a department head means nothing given that…</p>
<p>Most research schools have to beg, plead, and/or bribe faculty to become department chairs. Many do it because their course load gets reduced by one each year they are chair. Most research faculty despise the idea of being chair and the politics involved. It has absolutely nothing to do with quality of scholarship or teaching. Basically, anyone tenured can be chair.</p>
<p>Same thing At LACs although they just tend to rotate people in. ‘Prof Joe, you haven’t been chair in 10 years, your turn now’.</p>
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<p>Lecturing, no matter how entertaining or inspiring, isn’t teaching. Teaching involves interaction between the teacher and the individual learner. You cannot have meaningful individual interaction between a lecturer and hundreds of listeners.</p>
<p>I tend to agree, lecturing is not necessarily teaching.</p>
<p>But here is the problem…too many instructors (even those at LACs) rely on lecturing rather than teaching even in sections of 20, 30, 40 students.</p>
<p>You do realize that they count every warm body on staff (vice presidents etc) in that ratio?</p>
<p>The better question is “how large are most of the classes in the department my child will be in?” Even if the freshman lecture is 100 students, if the upper level classes drop to an average of 25, it may be fine.</p>
<p>At our state flagship with an 18:1 ratio, my son applied to a department that only accepted 10 students per year and all the classes were very, very small.</p>
<p>Virtually all professors at LACs engage in research and publishing in their fields (with perhaps the exception of performing artists, who do that instead). LACs provide plenty of research opportunities for undergraduates, and most LACs are now working on making sure that non-science majors also have research opportunities.</p>
<p>As a PhD student at an Ivy, I taught entire sections of English Comp, and I sure wasn’t as good as the full professor I had as an undergrad at my LAC. More enthusiastic, certainly. But nowhere near as good.</p>
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<p>Why not? I’m a chaired full professor and during my 3 year stint as dept chair I also continued teaching freshmen because it’s my favorite class to teach. My university has 40,000 students!</p>
<p>emilybee… my son is at a research university 11k undergrads, he has 2 profs this semester that are dept heads, and as a freshman had at least one dept head per semester, (think 2nd semester was also 2). all his classes are taught by profs… there are ta’s in the labs to assist but they dont teach the classes</p>
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<p>Now you’re just making stuff up to mince words. I’ve taught 100-150 students in the past. I would meet with them, I knew who they are, back then I gave them individual feedback, and I could evaluate their participation. I wasn’t just lecture at all. I have them working in small groups, and we have group discussions and exercises, we analyze cases as a class, and I could go on and on. It’s not better- I’m not defending it at all and MUCH prefer the small classes I teach now. But to arbitrarily decide ‘it can’t be teaching’ is a bit ridiculous. Look at even Harvard’s MBA class…90 students easily analyze cases together. Or is that not teaching either?</p>
<p>I said lecturing isn’t teaching. If you really were able to teach a class of 100-150 students with real interaction between individual students and the professor - which, frankly, I would have to see to believe - then you weren’t lecturing.</p>
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<p>Not only is my freshman D, who attends our State Flagship (Very Large Public University), taught by a departement head, she is also taught in another course by a Nobel Laureate. Not bad for my in-state tuition dollars. :)</p>
<p>My dd got into our Flagship and our state supported honors LAC. She chose the LAC because it would allow her more face to face interaction. She is a chemisty major and would be in a class of 300 for her freshman class at the university and 30 at the LAC. She loves the interaction she has in her small classes. She is a freshman. She has classes of 10, 18, 20 and her chemistry class of 30. Chemistry lab has 12 people though. I am positive that most classes will be between 15 and 20 on average. Upper courses will have 10 or so. She will ample opportunity to assist the professors with their research. There are no graduate students so the undergrads assist. </p>
<p>All classes are taught by professors. I think she will have a better chance of grad school going to the LAC.</p>
<p>It is not required for the class to be small to teach in a way that involves more interaction than a traditional lecture:
[Rethinking</a> the Way College Students Are Taught](<a href=“http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/tomorrows-college/lectures/rethinking-teaching.html]Rethinking”>Rethinking the Way College Students Are Taught)</p>
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<p>True. But remember, the PhD production numbers capture PhD completions, not (directly) graduate admissions. Regardless of what anyone thinks of the value of this degree, getting one is hard. It takes brains, motivation, and preparation. A high per capita PhD production rate suggests that a college is doing a good job of attracting bright students, then motivating and preparing them for graduate work.</p>
<p>No doubt, self-selection drives up the numbers at some schools. That in itself tells you something. Academic research & instruction is what universities are all about. Mid-career salaries or the number of alumni CEOs don’t tell you anything about the quality of history or biology teaching. A high rate of PhD production in those fields probably does (assuming the absolute volume isn’t trivially small, which may be the case for some very small LACs in a couple of fields).</p>
<p>I heard about a large state university that has huge lecture classes, but often does not offer smaller supplementary discussion classes. That is the worst of all worlds.</p>
<p>Gosh, things must have changed quite a lot on Big U campuses since I was a student/grad student - all these dept. chairs teaching freshman intro courses. Who knew?!?</p>
<p>Ratio is very low in Honors and some majors/classes simply require very low ratio, like some of my D’s classes in her Music minor, she mentioned that some had less than 10 kids in class just because of nature of the class. General discussion sometime is not applicable. Also, none od D’s UG classes were taught by Grad. students. This is a difference between highly ranked research univeristy where prof’s primary focus is his research and UG where teaching students is primary focus of faculty.</p>