<p>Oh, they wouldn’t if the second thing is true, they could easily if the first thing is true. It seems like the second thing is false, given the evidence from the NYU course pages, it seems as though graduate students are doing more teaching and are spending more time teaching overall (and others in this thread seem to concur with that intellectual seeming). </p>
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<p>If I couldn’t read, then you wouldn’t have been able to respond to my first criticism of your post, since it would have been completely incoherent with your post and off topic (as the probability I would be able to know what you were talking about in your original post is 0). </p>
<p>If I lacked critical reading ability, I wouldn’t have been able to point out the various errors in your inferences, such as the invalid inference from the premise “graduate students teach less classes than professors” to the conclusion “graduate students do less teaching than professors”. These inferences would be too subtly invalid for me to catch their invalidity if I lacked the aforementioned ability.</p>
<p>You obviously lack critical reading ability, as the NYU page you’re attempting to use to support your claim DOES NOT support your claim.</p>
<p>(1) The majority of courses are taught by professors? True.
(2) In each course taught by a professor, the professor teaches the class? True.
(3) In such classes the professors teaches for 2h30m per week? True.
(4) In lower-level classes where there is a recitation section, graduate students lead recitation for 1h15m per week? True.
Therefore,
(5) The professor spends 2x as much time teaching than the graduate student, when there is a recitation section.
(6) The professor is the only one teaching in a course without a recitation? True.
Therefore,
(7) The professor spends more time teaching than a graduate student.</p>
<p>What part of this are you unable to comprehend?</p>
<p>Do everyone a favor, including yourself, and just stop posting. You’ve merely managed to demonstrate and then re-demonstrate that you have no idea what you’re talking about.</p>
<p>Oh, that’s not true at all. A listener is definitely not justified in being upset (they are no practical or epistemic reason to be). Further, they may definitely have a reason to grant the assertion credence, namely if they have the intuition that P after I mention it to them. </p>
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<p>Oh, you certainly could reject any one of my statements, if you just found them counterintuitive and refused to research them by asking graduate students about them or googling them. However, this wouldn’t change at all if I presented any evidence for them (you would be justified in rejecting any of that evidence on the same grounds).</p>
<p><a href=“1”>quote</a> The majority of courses are taught by professors? True.
(2) In each course taught by a professor, the professor teaches the class? True.
(3) In such classes the professors teaches for 2h30m per week? True.
(4) In lower-level classes where there is a recitation section, graduate students lead recitation for 1h15m per week? True.
Therefore,
(5) The professor spends 2x as much time teaching than the graduate student, when there is a recitation section.
(6) The professor is the only one teaching in a course without a recitation? True.
Therefore,
(7) The professor spends more time teaching than a graduate student.
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<p>Oh, this is already invalid, since (5) doesn’t follow from (1)-(4). I imagine you wanted to include:</p>
<p>(4a) The professor’s classes and the graduate student’s classes have the same quantity of sessions.
(4b) There are less recitation sections than class sections. </p>
<p>We also need to change premise 2 so as to show that graduate students teach the same amount as professors in lecture (I am guessing this is what you were trying to say, and were not simply avoiding mentioning the lecturing time of graduate students, since that seems like too simple a mistake for you to make), by avoiding a fallacy of equivocation between “professor” and “instructor”:</p>
<p>(3*) In such classes the instructor teaches for 2h30m per week? True.</p>
<p>Including these, we have a valid argument, since 1-4b (with 3* instead of 3) force 5, and 7 is valid from 6. Unfortunately, the argument is unsound, since 3* is false (not every class involves the same amount of teaching, as I noted earlier, some classes may involve 6 hours of teaching per week, some may only involve the amount of lecture hours, etc).</p>
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<p>Oh, you can take my posts however you want to, but I think this conversation is already not only offering advice to people about NYU and its students and teachers, but is <em>also</em> giving them some free instruction on the cooperative principle and logical inference! As well as how to formalize (and how <em>not</em> to formalize) an argument.</p>
<p>For classes taught by a professor:
During lecture time, GRADUATE STUDENTS DO NOT LECTURE NOR DO THEY TEACH. The professor teaches for 2h30min per week.</p>
<p>Graduate students ATTEND lecture and then, during recitation, host a Q&A. Recitation is NOT a presentation of a new material; it is not just like another lecture section, taught by a professor. Recitation is held for 1hr15m per week.</p>
<p>I’ve tried to tell you, many time, graduate students DO NOT TEACH for such classes.</p>
<p>The majority of classes are taught by… whom? Professors.</p>
<p>For classes taught by graduate students:
They spend the same amount of time lecturing, 2h30min, per week.</p>
<p>If there is a recitation section, a different graduate student will host that recitation section for 1hr15min, per week. </p>
<p>If the majority of classes are taught by professors, which means the majority of teaching time is held by professors, how are graduate students doing MORE teaching? </p>
<p>The only way your statement is true is if graduate students teach better than professors, such that, they teach more information during the much less amount of time they spend with students. If this were true, this would apply to EVERY university that has graduate students interact with students and not just NYU… </p>
<p>Yet again, you’ve demonstrated your ignorance of the department at NYU.</p>
<p>This is the only relevant part of your post which actually objects to anything I’ve said. It seems to me you think this conditional is true. That is, you think the majority of teaching time is held by those who teach the most classes. Again, this is false (since classes can involve different teaching times. E.g. Logic may involve 6 hours a week of teaching, while a metaethics course only involves 2 and a half hours per week (since all the teaching can be done during lecture)).</p>
<p>As for all other universities, it is indeed the case that at most other universities, graduate students do most of the teaching (NYU is actually very unusual in this sense, since they actually have a smaller amount of graduate student teaching than most universities, which is illustrated by their course catalog).</p>
<p>I know NYU2013 wants to insist that what grad students do in recitation sections isn’t “teaching.” I don’t want to get into a silly terminological quibble, but if you add up all the classroom instructional time (lectures as well as recitations) done per week by professors and grad students in the NYU philosophy department in the Fall of 2012, graduate students hold 40 hours per week (10 hours of lecture and 30 hours of recitations) while professors hold 27.5 hours per week (all lectures). It’s only by labeling what grad students do in recitation sections as “not teaching” that you can say professors do most of the teaching.</p>
<p>And if leading a recitation section doesn’t involve teaching, then I guess I’d have to question the pedagogical value of the recitation section. </p>
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<p>I obviously haven’t made a study of “all other universities,” but I think in most of the better philosophy departments, faculty do most if not all of the teaching. That’s certainly true at Princeton, Harvard, and Michigan. I would say that NYU is unusual in that, among the top philosophy programs, its grad students play an unusually large role in undergraduate instruction.</p>
<p>Ironically enough, you provide evidence for a belief you hold that argues that no such evidence is required for you to be justified with the belief you hold. That position’s probably self-defeating.</p>
<p>You could bite the bullet and say you’re arguing/positing a position you don’t believe. But that would seem odd, since arguing something seems sufficient for you believing it to be the case, and hence you’d be contradicting yourself; or because you’d be arguing something you don’t believe which would make you look foolish.</p>
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<p>First, i doubt you actually <em>are</em> justified in believing that P; Secondly, even if you were, counterfactually, that isn’t the discussion we’re having. We’re talking about burden of proof in an argument, not justification with regard to belief. Your arguments are nothing more than a strawman.</p>
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<p>You’re very fond of the indicative tense. Unfortunately for you, your tense doesn’t indicate the matter of fact.</p>
<p>Discussions and debates are in no way mutually exclusive. in fact, every instance of the latter is probably an instance of the former. </p>
<p>And, unfortunately for you, you are involved in a debate. Whether you’re involved in one or not depends on the matter and form being discussed. Your ‘advice’ asserts that P; NYU and myself are asserting that not P. You defend P against our claims that not P. We provide evidence for not P, and you don’t provide evidence for P. Based on your lack of evidence for P, we find reason to reject P in favor of not P.</p>
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<p>I don’t doubt that you can read or have the ability to think critically. What you’re doing at this point is nothing more than a red herring. The original point of debate was whether NYU graduate students taught more than professors did. That’s a claim which you vaguely provided evidence for by showing NYU’s course registrar without citing any specific term of classes (something you still haven’t done.) At this point you’re just engaging in petty discussion, which clearly is contrary to the ‘advice’ you stated that you were “merely” offering. </p>
<p>Conclusion: You’re a ■■■■■, and a poor one at that. I smiled when i read ‘the budern of proof doesn’t lie on me.’ I’m not sure exactly which ■■■■■ you are, but i’m sure you’ll find yourself here:</p>
<p>Yet it seems to be unavoidable. The points of contention are “most” and “teaching.” I share an intuition with NYU. The person teaching the class (e.g. professor, lecturer, adjunt, or graduate student) do the teaching. They set a particular subject to be discussed, the methods for how testing is to be set, and the curve (if any) for how grades will be distributed. When you pay fees, you do so for that person to teach you a particular subject. TAs are essentially just there to provide a different perspective, or elaborate on ideas. But for them to even do that, they need to learn, what the person who’s teaching the class is teaching.</p>
<p>Can you call what TAs do teaching? Sure. But i think it’s obvious that it’s a different sense of teaching than professors provide. I don’t consider the layman on the street to be ‘teaching’ me when he offers me an anecdote. Although i suppose someone could call it that if they wanted to take a very liberal interpretation of what ‘teaching’ meant.</p>
<p>“I know NYU2013 wants to insist that what grad students do in recitation sections isn’t “teaching.” I don’t want to get into a silly terminological quibble, but if you add up all the classroom instructional time (lectures as well as recitations) done per week by professors and grad students in the NYU philosophy department in the Fall of 2012, graduate students hold 40 hours per week (10 hours of lecture and 30 hours of recitations) while professors hold 27.5 hours per week (all lectures). It’s only by labeling what grad students do in recitation sections as “not teaching” that you can say professors do most of the teaching.” </p>
<p>I don’t have a problem with this, and I’m not saying teaching is not happening in recitation sections. If you want to consider the type of teaching TA’s and professors as the same (which, really, it isn’t; as TA’s host more of a Q&A session for specific questions), then fine, but I would still disagree with the method of analysis. I don’t agree with this analysis of “teaching”, or rather, how you are adding together the time spent teaching.</p>
<p>I’m analyzing it from a student’s point of view – a professor will teach the student more hours per week than a graduate student. Sure, because of the large number of recitation sections and number of graduate students, these graduate students are spending more absolute time teaching if we add up ALL of the hours each graduate student is teaching. However, this doesn’t seem like a fair analysis. </p>
<p>I would analyze it from a student’s point of view – who is teaching me (the student) most? That would be professors, as they spend the most time with professors and not graduate students.</p>
<p>With professors generally. A professor will lecture on something. When students would have questions they’d ask them to professors. And professors would entertain their questions and point out any interesting points / defects within the questions, or attempt to clarify the student’s position if the point is unclear. Professors love being asked questions (at least in philosophy)</p>
<p>Graduate students generally do a much poorer job of this because they generally aren’t teaching within a subject of their expertise in recitations. (unlike professors)</p>
<p>During lecture, professors want students to stop them if they have any questions, as it makes lectures more interesting, generates discussion, etc.</p>
<p>I want to say that disregarding prestige and all of that, hands down, St John’s College in Annapolis (and Santa Fe) has the best academics around. (On a personal note, I was an idiot not to go.) And my complete lack of argument, unlike the five pages worth, doesn’t take away from the fact that if the life of the mind is your thing, St John’s is where you want to be. </p>
<p>By the way, NYU may have some superstar philosophy professors but a professor of mine told me that NYU doesn’t by a long shot place even in the top ten, undergrad or grad. I don’t know if that true at all. I wish there was some sort of definite list.</p>
<p>Your professor is quite obviously wrong. There are many rankings of United States philosophy departments, and NYU is at the top or 4 places from it or less in each of them (with the exception of miller’s curious TT placement ranking).</p>
<p>S.t. Johns is also not a notable school in philosophy, in terms of research or teaching.</p>
<p>Here’s a more recent 2011 Philosohpical Gourmet ranking based on a survey of philosophers. For my money, PG is a more reliable source in this field, in part because it’s more recent; both Chicago and Carnegie Mellon are probably overrated by NRC due to some faculty losses that occurred after the NRC data were collected. And NYU definitely strengthened its faculty in that period.</p>
<p>The two rankings are consistent in placing Princeton, Rutgers, Michigan, and NYU in the top handful, and Pitt, MIT, and Stanford in the top 10 but lower than the first 4 I mentioned. </p>
<p>Heh. The PG ranking must really get Princeton’s goat. They’re not used to being number two in the state of New Jersey in anything they do.</p>
<p>I stopped reading the comments at around page 4 so I don’t know where the conversation went after m just started being kind of delusional with his comments. but yea let me just make a few points about recitations and also NYU professors as an alum of NYU…</p>
<p>so my first point about recitations is that recitations by definition are classes that are taught by TAs or teaching assistants, teaching assistants who are graduate students in the department of the class being taught. and recitation classes supplement the main classes to help the students understand the material better by requiring them to spend an additional 1 and half hours during the week in addition to the time spent in the two classes during the week to engage in discussion with other students and a teaching assistant… personally, I never took a course that was not taught by a professor with the exception to one introductory English lit course. so there you go… </p>
<p>and listen, NYU is just like any other college in regards to the ratio of classes that are taught by professors. it’s no different at all. but the students have the benefit of taking courses that are taught by - as some people said in this thread - “leaders in the field.” that’s all to say that in terms of the experience which is really what is the topic of this thread - in the end, it’s the same exact experience as other colleges… but again - there are really good professors at NYU - i guess like the best according to what the rankings have said and according to people who know like good philosophers and stuff. </p>