[quote]rcsermas wrote:
jtrinsey wrote:
waylanderxx wrote:
Awesome thanks guys. Yah, I have to teach myself how to do optimization problems and how to differentiate exponential functions tonight. My asshole of a teacher just writes the concepts on the board and doesn’t do example problems. Makes us teach ourselves. Really fucking annoying.
Welcome to higher education. The majority of math professors are a fucking joke and grad school ain’t much better. I had two professors in undergrad who literally did nothing but transcribe the class notes onto the board. It is literally no exaggeration to say that a high school kid could have taught the classes just as well. By sophomore year I would just go to class to count in the attendance and sit and do my homework so at least I was doing something worthwhile with that hour.
It is pretty sad that I am in grad school for applied math and I learn more off Wikipedia/Planet Math than I do from the actual lectures.
P.S. Feel free to hit me up with a PM if you need some help another time; I am constantly frustrated by how shittily most schools teach calc, so I am always happy to help somebody out.
All too true unfortunately. I’m about to graduate with a B.S. in applied math and I’ve had one good professor in my four years at university. I pretty much taught myself from the textbook for most courses. Many of the professors just don’t seem to give a shit and only teach because they have to. [/quote]
I hate to agree with this because it seems to just become an excuse for many students, but unfortunately this is true, though it is not exclusive to math. (I also have a B.S. in math, btw).
I’m not going to name schools because I find it difficult to believe it is different at most other schools, but it was no different for me than what you two have described, except I can honestly say I had two math teachers that seemed to enjoy teaching. One was a local actuary and only teaching a couple classes part time as a side job, the other wasn’t tenured either and left the year after I left the class for another position. In other words, I wouldn’t have recommended a single tenured professor in the math department.
It was never that big of a deal to me as I learn much better on my own as long as I have decent text. I’m just not an aural learner and had trouble paying attention in a classroom.
The solutions to these problems run much deeper than just getting some new teachers. The median quality of the student is also to blame and is declining at an extraordinary rate as the number of people to go to college increases. In a nutshell, I think universities have lost track of their original purpose and many departments are simply becoming research businesses that rely on the revenue stream created through mass education. Government (state and federal) only exasperates the problem with incentives to send more and more people to school. When college is available to all, regardless of actual intelect, you can only expect the quality to diminish and it is the above average students that end up being punished. We are seeing a similar effect in K-12 education. Instead of actually grouping students by intellect and providing them with different challenge relative to that intellect, we cater to the students of lowest and average intellect. Again, the best students are forced to suffer, and most don’t yet have the maturity or experience to realize the harm that is being done until it is too late. They are then perfectly willing to excel at mediocre tasks in the classroom, never to realize their full potential in the classroom.
