Hey Prof, Learn to Teach!
It is fair to say that teaching undergraduate students is not a top priority for most professors or administrators at the University. I am consistently baffled at the poor teaching skills that I, and everyone else, run into in the university system. You would think that an entity supporting higher education would attempt to better the educating process of the fee-paying students. What we often get for our money, however, are intelligent professors who are too rapt up in their own research to really give a damn about being benevolent teachers.
I talked to Georgeanne Cooper, the program director for the Teaching Effectiveness Program (TEP), briefly this morning. The program’s largest project is an annual workshop before the fall school term for around 300 first-time teachers and GTFs, many of whom are “scared” about having to teach. Other than that, the program works with about 10 to 25 tenured faculty in various teaching items like teaching with technology. Cooper said the TEP deals with “practical” problems and is here to evaluate individual performances. She agreed with me that most professors in a “research institution” are tied down to their own studies and put being a good teacher lower on their list of goals.
Now compare this to Center For Teaching at Vanderbilt, which combines the intellectual art of teaching with higher education research. It believes “that teaching and learning as intellectual invention differ from research only in kind, not in degree and importance.” In 2004, CFT director said, “Teaching without learning is just talking … the real focus needs to be on helping students figures out what makes them learn best.”
Wow, a university that uses experimentation and inquiry to discovering what makes students the best possible scholars. What a freaking radical idea! God for bid the UO supported such thinking. Oh well, I guess having crappy teachers gives us one more thing to gripe and moan about.
So let’s hear it, who are the worst teachers in this place? I would say former Poly Sci prof Jerry Medler, but luckily he moved his socialt behind up to Canada.
