Comments on: But what does it teach you?

By: Pangolin

Pangolin — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 06:57:42 +0000

Quoting slightly further down:

“An intelligent person is open-minded, an outside-the-box thinker, an effective communicator, is prudent, self-critical, consistent, and so on. These are not qualities readily subject to measurement.”

Try starting college with these qualities and finishing sane. Virtually all class requirements are that you memorize whatever the person in front is saying and spit it back on demand; once. Then it is perfectly acceptable to forget said knowledge.

Actual creative, analytical thinking about course materials is frowned upon. Discussion of materials between faculty and students is unheard of and entirely absent in the student body.

I live in a college town. I never, ever, overhear students discussing course material except in the context of completion of assignment A. EVER.

By: C.M.Hardin

C.M.Hardin — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 15:54:21 +0000

My thoughts exactly ^^^

By: Sol G., ALB Candidate

Sol G., ALB Candidate — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 12:35:17 +0000

On the subject of professors: One oddity of today’s education is that classes are increasingly being taught by grad students, or even by TA’s who are not grad students. We don’t know who to call “professor,” because many of our educators are our own age and simply filling in. Frequently, papers are corrected by someone with limited field knowledge. We cannot take for granted that the actual professor of any class will ever interact with us in person. It’s strange to call someone my own age, “Mr./Ms. *insert actual derp*” but we don’t start with ‘professor,’; because they usually aren’t one.

By: Tardigrade

Tardigrade — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 09:22:06 +0000

I’ll somewhat agree with Mat on appearance and demeanor, but didn’t experience narcissism or self-absorbedness. The teachers I have had cared.

From the article: “Society wants to identify intelligent people early on so that it can funnel them into careers that maximize their talents. It wants to get the most out of its human resources. College is a process that is sufficiently multifaceted and fine-grained to do this.”

Ok…someone hasn’t read the literature.

By: Let’s hope America’s failed socialist approach teaches us something about our education system, before it’s too late « Joshua Lachkovic's Blog

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 06:36:53 +0000

[...] in America: “Live and Learn – Why We Have College” by Louis Menand (via @MindHacks). While the whole article is worth a read, I’ll pull out a few of the statistics that are [...]

By: Mat

Mat — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 05:41:16 +0000

Perhaps in the process, the concept of “college professor” has changed as well. As an “older student” returning to school, I’m struck by how little really distinguishes the appearance and demeanor of the teachers now from the rest of the class, besides “age”. And it also seems like many of the professors these days are often just as narcissistic and self-absorbed as their students. For example I recently recall one Computer Science professor who always dressed like a “biker”, and took every opportunity to let us know how “cool” he was (re: his tastes in music, food, politics, motorcycles, etc.). The class was basically a captive audience & a source of “narcissistic supply” for his personality.