<p>Written by a former Harvard PhD student (and current assistant professor at SUNY Buffalo), but I hardly think it is specific only to Harvard. </p>
<p>*"...Graduate school is where future academics learn their disrespect for teaching....Graduate students are taught that teaching is not important. The reason graduate students aren’t required to teach more is that faculty want them in the lab or the library doing research. Research is what earns you a job, tenure, and worldwide renown; teaching is a distraction. Graduate students with an interest in teaching hear warning after warning that this is not the right thing to do. “You’ve taught enough.” “You need more papers on your resume, not another class.” “Why are you so interested in teaching? Is your research going OK?”..."
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<p>I guess my question is, what is the alternative? The author is correct that teaching is getting short shrift in the department, but how does academic society need to change to fit a greater focus on teaching? Your teaching isn’t seen in the outside world, and I don’t know how this can necessarily be changed.</p>
<p>I just want to say I’ve had the opposite experience with my advisor, with him recommending TAing as much as possible, so we can really learn the material well.</p>
<p>I also have to say, the more I teach, the more I feel a lot of the blame rests on the students. I get some of the highest ratings in my department as a TA, but I’m just astounded how many of the students only see labs/classes as a thing to get through and not as an opportunity to actually learn something new.</p>
<p>I should also say I’ve found dealing with undergrads is about a hundred times worse than dealing with grad students. TAing grad classes has been a lot more rewarding since most of the students in the class are there because they really want to, and not because they have to (I’d say the percentages are flipped between grad and undergrad). To me it’s become no wonder that so many professors want to avoid undergrad classes at all cost.</p>
<p>I want to teach at a teaching college - an LAC or a small regional university. But my advisors (I have two, being in a joint program) say the same things as the one in the article - when I say I want to teach a summer class, one says he doesn’t think that’s a useful thing for a PhD student to do. When I said I wanted to TA again, the other one just cautioned me to not allow it to “get in the way” of my research. And when I told my TA supervisor that I enjoyed TAing for her class, she laughed bitterly and said that this was the problem, that I’ll enjoy teaching too much and perhaps not publish, and warned me not to like it too much.</p>
<p>It’s so <em>weird</em> since if we all go into academia 95% of us will be at schools with 3/3 loads and likely only a small line of research, if any.</p>
<p>I also think the grad classes depend on the program - in my department many of the MPH students don’t want to be there anymore than the undergrads. Or they don’t want to be in that particular class even though it’s required, and fail to see how they will use the material in any job they enter.</p>
<p>Also this:</p>
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<p>Is so true. I’m on an NSF fellowship and last semester I had to FIGHT to get paid for TAing. Even though the NSF says that TAing is acceptable, for some reason financial aid gets involved and decides (arbitrarily, in the middle of the year) that the NSF doesn’t want us to TA and that if we’re going to do it, we won’t get paid.</p>
<p>I know I get tuition waved for each quarter I TA, so my advisor’s quite happy when I do it since it’s a pretty big drop in the amount of money he has to spend on me. This is probably a much more significant chunk of money at private schools versus public, though.</p>
<p>I gleaned my distaste for teaching in high school but then I was always an overachiever. I think that we shouldn’t ignore other forms of teaching that are more acceptable to the scientific establishment- think about all of the postdocs who have helped you plan an experiment or taught you a technique, what about the day to day mentoring that occurs in the lab; isn’t that all teaching as well? I would imagine that the adage ‘experience is the best teacher’ could be applied in highly technical fields where you really learn best by running that deep sequencing experiment or planning a project on your own. And finally, we also shouldn’t ignore that there are legitimate requirements for training that goes along with every postdoc fellowship. So I guess what I am trying to say is that, teaching need not be in the classroom and I think the reason that academics seem to despise classroom teaching is that it is by necessity removed from knowledge generation.</p>
<p>I feel that classroom teaching is best left to professional lecturers since undergraduates don’t care if their ‘teacher’ is an M.A. or world-renowned researcher most of the time. They care if the teacher is audible, legible, and can present ideas in a clear and concise manner.</p>
<p>Those pursuing research and a career in academia would be best for out-of-classroom teaching, such as belevitt’s point about postdocs. Collaboration and apprenticeships are hands-on teaching where being a good “lecturer” is not really out of play. A professor doesn’t have to teach the fundamentals of his/her work that he/she hasn’t gone over in decades. They don’t have to ‘dumb down’ the technical level for students in a lab and what they’re teaching is highly relevant and contemporary.</p>
<p>But that raises the question: why couldn’t teaching be viewed and evaluated by the outside world? For example, in this day and age of pervasive information technology, why can’t lectures, or at least ‘teaser-trailer’ snippets’, from a university’s best teachers, be published on YouTube? After all, the performances of the best comedians, speechmakers, and even charismatic company presentations such as the Steve Jobs keynotes generate millions of views. Now obviously I’m not expecting a lecture on chemical engineering process control to generate millions of views, but it can still be exposed to the outside world for assessment. </p>
<p>For those who would argue that professors would then be weighed on the inherently subjective criteria of teaching ‘quality’ by viewers on YouTube, I would argue that it’s no more subjective than the way that research is judged by the peer-review process today. I will always remember one prof telling me that a ‘successful’ research paper consists of nothing more than an agreement amongst 4 people: the editor and 3 anonymous referees. </p>
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<p>Well, I’m not sure that plays much of a role. The humanities have little if any funding and grants, yet - at least to me - the disdain for teaching extends to humanities professors as well. Having known several humanities tenure-track junior professors, Frankly, they’re well-advised to spend as little time on their teaching as possible in order to devote themselves to research. </p>
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<p>As stated previously, I don’t think this discussion need be restricted to the sciences. Humanities professors are not truly ‘mentoring’ their graduate students in the manner of the sciences. There are no ‘labs’, there are no ‘principal investigators’, and there is certainly little day-to-day mentoring regarding technical procedures. Yet humanities academia, as least at the higher levels, seems to be just as research-oriented as the sciences are, where you will be judged predominantly if not solely on the quality of your publications.</p>
<p>ITunes U has a lot of free lectures by professors from places like Stanford, Yale, University of Edinburgh, Einstein College of Medicine, Bowdoin, Princeton, University of Tokyo . . . the list is extremely long. The disadvantage is that most, if not all, are podcasts, not videos.</p>
<p>Given that the Ipad/Iphone/Ipod-Touch now vastly outsells the classic (audio-only) Ipod, I’m sure that will change. Heck, I think we can all agree that widespread VOD will be the next great wave hitting the Internet - and indeed already has been for several years.</p>
<p>Podcasts aren’t bad, but some people need the visual part of learning (say, what is written on the board) to help reinforce the ideas being taught.</p>
I think that we shouldn’t ignore other forms of teaching that are more acceptable to the scientific establishment- think about all of the postdocs who have helped you plan an experiment or taught you a technique, what about the day to day mentoring that occurs in the lab; isn’t that all teaching as well? I would imagine that the adage ‘experience is the best teacher’ could be applied in highly technical fields where you really learn best by running that deep sequencing experiment or planning a project on your own. And finally, we also shouldn’t ignore that there are legitimate requirements for training that goes along with every postdoc fellowship. So I guess what I am trying to say is that, teaching need not be in the classroom and I think the reason that academics seem to despise classroom teaching is that it is by necessity removed from knowledge generation.</p>