<p>Myth: Great minds = great professors.</p>
<p>DD attends a great private and we’ve been surprised by her experience with highly credentialed profs who cannot translate their brilliance in the classroom. Professors who have zero people skills and more importantly - great difficulty communicating with their students.</p>
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<p>Please show the statistic/survey. According to PayScale, the starting hourly rate for nurses with less than one year experience is $ 19.59-20.58 /hr. That doesn’t come close to 71K/yr.
[PayScale</a> - Nurse Salary, Average Nurse Salaries, Registered Nurse Salary](<a href=“http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Registered_Nurse_(RN)/Hourly_Rate]PayScale”>Registered Nurse (RN) Hourly Pay in 2024 | PayScale)</p>
<p>At our local hospital (MA) the starting salary for nurses is far lower than 71K–and that’s if you can even get a job. The hospital recently laid-off a number of nurses.</p>
<p>Nurse RN</p>
<p>Starting Base
$39,000</p>
<p>3+ Years
$47,110</p>
<p>Staff RN
$44,200
$37,000</p>
<p>Master Level
$59,600
$49,700</p>
<p>Nurse Practitioner Salary Surveys<br>
US National Averages<br>
3+ Years Experience
$62,000</p>
<p>1st Year
$57,000</p>
<p>Locality</p>
<p>Urban
$63,000</p>
<p>Suburban
$64,000</p>
<p>Rural
$60,000</p>
<p>Degree Separations
PhD, Administration Director
$72,000</p>
<p>Master’s
$60,000</p>
<p>Bachelor’s
$45,500</p>
<p>Part-time hourly rate:
$35.10</p>
<p>$59,600
$49,700</p>
<p>[Nurse</a> Salaries - Nursing Salary Surveys](<a href=“allied-physicians.com”>allied-physicians.com)</p>
<p>I do believe that great minds make for great professors. It is doubtless true that some great minds have difficulty communicating with students (especially if the great mind does its thinking in a language other than English). But I think it is part of the students’ responsibility to do the work to put themselves in a position to get what the great minds have to offer. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a situation where, if the students did that, they didn’t get a huge benefit out of it.</p>
<p>I disagree, JHS. My father once had a roommate who was clearly a genius- and could understand nearly anything…except simple things, like how to make macaroni and cheese for himself. </p>
<p>Should he have become a professor, his intelligence would still be far beyond the average, but he’d still be more of an idiot savant than anything else. Genius =/= common sense or even good teacher. </p>
<p>And they call it “Absent minded professor” for a reason. ;]</p>
<p>Right, but who needs to pay $50,000+ per year for common sense, much less for making macaroni and cheese? I had very few professors whom I would trust to make me macaroni and cheese (unless I were trying to suck up to them, which I might well have been).</p>
<p>I want professors to have brilliant insights that deepen and change everyone’s understanding of the world, and to teach students how to look at things so as to understand them thoroughly and to leave open the possibility for critical insight. It doesn’t matter how good a communicator someone is if he doesn’t have the goods to deliver. If he has the goods, it’s great if he can communicate them well and easily, but even if he can’t students should be able to coax it out of him. Mentor is one model of a good teacher, but Proteus is another.</p>
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That would be the trick, and I think Mentor vs. Proteus is a useful distillation of LAC vs. university. Some people prefer a professor who can teach the skills necessary for brilliant insights, even if the professor doesn’t often have said insights. Some people prefer a professor who has brilliant insights because they learn better through firsthand observation of brilliance. (Well, I made up the second one because I’m an LAC girl through and through.)</p>
<p>“but even if he can’t students should be able to coax it out of him”</p>
<p>So it’s the students’ fault if they can’t get a prof to teach effectively?</p>
<p>Choose the schools that have profs with the goods and can deliver them well.</p>
<p>Top marks to you, Keil, for understanding the metaphor really well, but don’t be so quick to see Mentor vs. Proteus as distilling LAC vs. university. Both types of teachers are present at both, although LACs are willing to screen out the most extreme Proteans. And, remember, Proteus imparts a hell of a lot more useful, unique, and significant information than Mentor, who is not exactly a paradigm-shifter.</p>
<p>What everyone really wants is Virgil (of the Inferno). But there aren’t enough of him to go around.</p>
<p>vossron, almost. It’s the students’ fault (and loss) if they can’t figure out how to learn from someone who is trying to teach them, and who has unique insight to offer. I believe that. Not every bad teacher has jewels of wisdom hidden somewhere – most bad teachers are bad scholars, too. But I believe it’s a student’s responsibility to collaborate in his own education, and that when a great scholar is called a bad teacher, usually it’s a lazy student talking.</p>
<p>I’m with Keil. </p>
<p>So that makes another myth: The end result of going to an LAC and going to a big U will be pretty much the same.</p>
<p>…Not if we agree that certain things are different and the fundamental goals of teaching are varied.</p>
<p>EDIT: Now I could be wrong, but the way I look at it is the difference between my AP Language & Comp class and my AP lit class. One tells me what is being done, and asks me to find, recognize, and use that. (Ie: This is the fact, remember it, and recognize it so that it can be applied to life later.) The other tells me what could be there, and tells me to interpret the novel (World) and then ideally, apply my ability to interpret to everything. (Ie, this is how this set of facts could be interpreted based on other facts we know. Find an interpretation, and defend it. Figure out how to find what others may not see is there based on what we teach you to look for and the facts. Your answers may all be different but if it’s defendable, it can be applied.)</p>
<p>Neither is right or wrong, just different. (If that makes sense) And I’m sure you can find both in both types of schools…but we’ve obviously begun to generalize.</p>
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<p>You lost me there. I don’t actually know who Proteus or Mentor are. 
I agree that both types are present at both, but that doesn’t make an overall generalization false.</p>
<p>I believe in student responsibility, but in teacher responsibility first. They are, after all, teaching students because they are wiser, more mature, and ultimately more responsible.</p>
<p>In the Odyssey, Mentor is a wise elder who, in the absence of Telemachus’ father (Odysseus), takes Telemachus around and introduces him to the leading lights of the Greek world, and gives him advice about duty and manners and such. Proteus is a sea-god who appears in a story Menelaus tells Telemachus and Mentor. Proteus knew the truth about all conflicts between gods and men, but would only reveal it if he were wrestled, pinned, and held, while he changed shapes and tried to escape. Proteus wound up telling Menelaus how to get home, and also about Agamemnon’s murder and Odysseus’ shipwrecks, but only after a wild fight.</p>
<p>Yurtle: One hopes that NOTHING at your college resembles your description of either AP English Language or AP English Literature. That’s not what college should be like, no matter where you go.</p>
<p>And the essential equivalence of LAC and big Uni – that’s not a myth, that’s for real.</p>
<p>^Thanks for the mythology lesson!</p>
<p>I disagree on the “essential equivalence of LAC and big Uni” because I believe that a given person will be shaped differently by different life experiences. LACs and universities are different experiences both academically and socially, though the degree of that difference is arguable.</p>
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<p>That’s what makes them essential equivalents – that, and the fact that you are you wherever you go.</p>
<p>By the time someone is in college, does anyone care whether her elementary school used Montessori method?</p>
<p>Define essential equivalence, then. If I attend Swarthmore vs. UDel (or vs. Harvard, though I didn’t even apply), will my future be significantly different? Yes, because the opportunities that I would take advantage of are different. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I thrive on approachable teaching. My calculus teacher, widely acknowledged as the best of those at my school, has always said that she was never a “smart” math student. She just worked hard and learned the material well. And she teaches it incredibly well, as evidenced by both student praise and AP scores. A brilliant but unapproachable professor will remain unapproachable FOR ME because, well, I am me. And that contrast in intimacy is far from equivalent.</p>
<p>“I do believe that great minds make for great professors.”</p>
<p>CC’s obession ?
Teaching does requires training. If this great mind had no knowledge of how to teach effectively then he/she can not be a great professor. The problem is people assume great mind, great writer, great poet, great scientist can be a great teacher.</p>
<p>OOH Ulysses! My favorite poem!</p>
<p>I had plenty of brilliant and approachable professors at my university. I also enjoyed having a mix of little intimate classes and ones where you just sat back and listened to a brilliant lecturer.</p>
<p>^Cf. previous disclaimer on overall generalizations. It seems a generally accepted proposition that LACs are more focused on teaching than comparable universities in general.</p>
<p>Wait…whoa. How did my metaphor become something completely undesirable in education? Shouldn’t people be able to take facts and ideas and both apply AND find them/analyze why they are?</p>
<p>xD;</p>
<p>I think I was wildly misunderstood somehow.</p>
<p>I don’t agree things are always equivilant. If they were we wouldn’t call the schools different names. They’d just be “College”. </p>
<p>I, and my mother both agreed that the experience, and even education I would recieve at ASU would be no where near what I wanted or needed from a school. I am an LAC girl because my HS comes in at 3k+ and I felt that much larger would not allow for me to know my professors like I did my teachers, or even my fellow classmates- kids I’ve known now since 2nd grade, for many of them. I wanted to retain some of that academic tight knit community…and while ASU is taking some very smart friends of mine, they let pretty much anyone in.</p>
<p>If there wasn’t a generalized difference kids wouldn’t transfer when they found out a school was too small/large for them!</p>
<p>
I used a * because the asterisk is a standard wildcard character which indicates that any name could be put in that sentence while still retaining truth.
I concur that those were bad examples, mostly because the vast majority of students at any college will not become that famous. There are far too many factors at work in reaching that level of fame to make naming individual examples worthwhile in the slightest.
That’s where we disagree. You appear to think that because Reed is a “top-notch college” it is too far in the stratosphere of educational bliss to be mentioned in the same breath as some state university. Seriously, what’s the big deal? That poster’s whole point was that it is possible to succeed at any school…
I do not agree. This is a difference between good classes and bad ones, and I would expect such courses to be found at any university. Look at the very first homework assignment in an Honors Calc I course at the University of Alberta (a massive, research-oriented university): <a href=“http://www.math.ualberta.ca/~bowman/m117/assign1.pdf[/url]”>http://www.math.ualberta.ca/~bowman/m117/assign1.pdf</a> This is not massively rigorous, IMO-level mathematics. However, it is also most decidedly not plug-and-chug memorization math. A good assignment will be at the level of the average student but still imply interesting consequences for the more advanced to pursue. This is not strictly the purview of small classes - it is the obligation of good classes.</p>
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^This is one of three linear algebra courses at Swarthmore. It’s a first-year seminar open to students who received a 5 on Calc BC or placed equivalently by examination.</p>
<p>[Swarthmore</a> College | Academics | Course Catalog 2009-2010](<a href=“http://www.swarthmore.edu/cc_mathstats.xml]Swarthmore”>Program: Mathematics and Statistics - Swarthmore College - Acalog ACMS™)</p>