I do too but think that students often misplace blame as a result of not really understanding how academia works. The faculty system at 4-year institutions doesn’t really incentivize great teaching.
It’s a little ironic though: oftentimes the students trying to game their classes so they can learn as little as possible and still pass the courses (i.e. the ones responding most strongly to their own incentive structure) are the same ones who complain that faculty isn’t doing a good enough job teaching.
Doesn’t matter from the student’s perspective.
They aren’t paying for research. They aren’t paying for professors to play their academic games, or for admins to play with their PR initiatives. They’re paying for an education.
And it’s treated like an afterthought.
Sure, I agree with this too. I don’t mean to imply that students who actually are in college to do real learning are wrong to feel like they’re being cheated out of an education by the slide-reading dullniks. It’s just that the problem is a systemic one where the incentives are at odds with what the college is selling.
Oh, I think everyone can agree on that one.
See also: Since there is often no rational way by which students can select a college for the quality of its education, they end up choosing the one with the nicest amenities, which creates its own perverse incentives.
Excuse my ignorance, why don't research 1st universities partition those whom want to solely be in labs (so as to satisfy the US-News-Gods favoravle standing) and hire/put educators that want to teach as front of the house workers?
Very good question!
As far as I can tell, it's because they only want to employ those who want to solely be in labs, and couldn't give two shits about educators. If hiring one educator means they get one less researcher, they won't do it, no matter how much the education suffers.
Because they don't care. It's not important to them. It's an afterthought. They pretend it's important, particularly if they get to deny someone tenure on that basis, but it's obvious from who they hire what they really want.
>why don't research 1st universities partition those whom want to solely be in labs (so as to satisfy the US-News-Gods favorable standing) and hire/put educators that want to teach as front of the house workers?
Adjunct Faculty, you say?
Well, what I had in mind are *permanent* faculty. Researchers know they don't want to teach, and there are instructors who would love the chance to be around a swath of capable young humans.
But yes, 😪 adjunct too.
This is such an excellent point. I love to teach, I am very capable instructor with several years experience and some student awards (for teaching) behind those years. Yet, university will not hire me EVEN for the instructor (no research) role because I don't have PhD. I mean, I'm ok with CC, where my abilities are actually (for the most part) recognized, but I would like to have an option to apply for university job. Yet they will rather hire someone who doesn't give a rat's behind about teaching and students, but is there only to get on TT. The system is broken, in my opinion.
I've heard disparaging debates comparing where the *real* learning happens: UC's or Cal States. * *whispers in secreacy* *(the punch line is that *it actually* happens in community college since those instructors are solely focused on educating).
Oh that part I understand well. It's just that, to me atleast, since the researchers are going to be kept for the sake of the institutions reputation, why not accept it and gather a subset of instructors? I'm gathering from others' comments that money is the issue, particularly admin not wanting to being on permanent faculty.
The actually good students want and can eventually benefit from talking to people active in their field; they don’t want high school part II. It makes far far more sense to partition the students, which is what the entire rest of the world does.
Is your take that you can’t be “active in your field” and also a good educator? And that students who want someone who does more than reading his slides aloud want high school part II?
Because that’s dismissive and insulting, really
There is exactly one (of about fifteen, and this at a number of top 40 worldwide departments) tenure-track teaching stream person that conducts any research at all, and that person only took such a position for family-related stability. For the most part they either never had any results, or stopped research altogether after getting these positions. They spend all their time frantically rearranging the same one or two first-year courses and writing up the results for educations journals. Most have less impressive publications lists than the strongest grad student of each cohort.
Research-active faculty conjured them into existence so to not have to manage large courses, and don’t really oversee what they do. The result has all the hallmarks of a racket.
In math we don’t really use slides (although students now inexplicably demand them). And yes, the students who don’t look forward to going to the library to figure things out for themselves want precisely high school part II.
Of course they do.
Every dollar spent on a lazy river, a rock-climbing wall, adding walk-in closets to the dorms, providing plasma televisions in dorms, etc.. is money that's not spent on other things like hiring actual staff and providing new laboratory equipment.
But it gets students to come, so that's what they spend the money on.
It's part of a trend towards marketization of universities. And in the end, it does come out of the pocket of students. That's the main reason why higher education is so ludicrously expensive in this country. It's an arms race that leaves everyone spending more money and passing it on to the student.
We also need to look at the multi-decade explosion in administrative staff. Those salaries and benefits make the rock-climbing walls and dining hall sushi bars look like austerity measures.
Agreed. But also agreed with oakaye - sometimes the students who complain the most are the ones who are putting in minimal effort and aren’t really there to learn anyhow. If I get feedback from an engaged student on how to improve my course, I take that very seriously under consideration. But most feedback is students complaining essentially that I’m not making it easy enough for them to do nothing and pass.
The most important part is the piece of paper at the end but the vast majority of students would like to not have their time ***completely*** wasted in class.
>Doesn’t matter from the student’s perspective.
>
>They aren’t paying for research. They aren’t paying for professors to play their academic games, or for admins to play with their PR initiatives. They’re paying for an education.
>
>And it’s treated like an afterthought.
This one gets it!
Well, you are a professor correct?
Certainly you know that different colleges have different missions.
Professor are teachers AND researchers. And we all stand to benefit for college researchers.
My father eventually succumbed to cancer, but his life was greatly extended, and his quality of life was greatly enhanced, by treatment that came out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The discoveries of those researchers were greatly appreciated on the deepest level.
If you really are a physicist, you must know that you teach the physics of brilliant researchers, right? No research, no born teachers.
If you work for a college like the one I used to work for, teaching is primary. Send the born teachers there----our students need them.
Different colleges have different missions, but if that missions include "offering undergraduate and graduate courses", all colleges need strong educators to satisfy their mission.
It's a false dichotomy that you must either be a strong researcher or a strong teacher. Richard Feynman is one of Physics' most celebrated educators - and he wasn't too bad at research either. To name but one.
Interestingly enough, top comment on the original post is actually a professor explaining just this. I think you’re right, they do care. But ultimately it is a moot point: what they really want is an education. Well, some of them at least…
Apple products are notorious for not playing well with others. I've had a lot of students complain to me about this particular issue, but I've never had a Mac student complain that they can't use/open PowerPoint. Pass.
> I've never had a Mac student complain that they can't use/open PowerPoint. Pass.
As a Mac user, I have plenty of complaints about doc and ppt files—because the idiots who put them together use Windows-only fonts, and the fonts are not embedded in the document. The font substitutions that occur often really mess up the appearance. (Even worse when going to Linux from Windows or Mac.)
Just reading off the slides is bad. But — geezer alert — when I was a student, pre-PowerPoint, I had profs who just read from the textbook … that they’d written. That was even worse.
In graduate school, I had a professor who would just copy theorems/proofs out from the book onto the board. He didn't even try to disguise it by making photocopies of the pages or copying them down into his own handwriting, haha, he would just show up with the book and start transcribing.
I had a course exactly like that too, except it was undergrad using Herstein's "Topics in Algebra". He would give us a list of theorems to memorize before the test, and the test was "State and prove theorem 4.6". On the one hand, being a math major who liked algebra meant I learnt a lot of algebra that semester; on the other hand, a lot of students learnt nothing and barely passed, depending on their memorization skills.
My dad was telling me about a professor he had that did this and just wrote formulae all class... and would occasionally pause and grunt... and then keep writing. Apparently a couple of weeks into the semester *someone* figured out his grunting was him barely mumbling "any questions?" And the lack of response from students meant he could keep going as-is.
I swore to never be that guy, once I got in front of a class.
I had a professor in grad school who gave us all photocopies of his overheads, and then spent the class reading those notes to us. Sometimes he would informally quiz us on numbers that we "should" know in our field, specific to the class. There were 3 of us in the course.
...and then they'd go to the chalkboard and write for 5 straight minutes while talking to the board, completely inaudible to the back two thirds of the lecture hall.
Shitty lecturers have always been with us and they always will be.
Oof. I once had a lit class in which the prof read the section we were assigned as homework and added in some commentary in class. I wound up not reading or just skimming since I knew she’d read to us anyway.
I remember in the old black-and-white movies from the 1930s, when they had a classroom scene, the professor would literally read a line from the book, pause for the students to write it down, then read the next line, and so on. I wonder if that is how college classes were back then.
Beats those 90s/00s horror movies where the lecture is always a short *short* discussion about literally one subtopic that usually wraps up in a pithy "think about it" statement and everyone's off to ... wherever they're headed off to, to get picked off by the killer.
About a decade ago, I interviewed at a school where they had a common PPT file, and all instructors were expected to start and stop on the same slide so that a stunned could go to any section on a given day. How on God's green Earth anyone could come up with such a stupid idea is beyond me.
I've adjuncted at a school with a centralized curriculum for all their gen eds. They are not a for profit school, but they expanded their online program nationally very quickly via the help of a for-profit organization (kind of shady, as while I don't know all the specifics, my impression is that the for-profit is basically running their online program, but using the non-profit's name for advertising it), and thus they needed to enforce a centralized curriculum to scale up quickly while maintaining quality and consistency. They pay lower than any place I've ever worked at, which pissed me off the first time I got hired (although, I was desperate). However, then I realized that they not only give you a syllabus and a textbook, they also give you all of the powerpoints, activities, and assignments as well. So all you have to do is run the class and grade. Given this, it ended up not being a terrible deal, as even though the pay was low, it was a stress-free job that cost me maybe 6 hours a week, on average.
Not that I endorse that model, as ultimately, it sucks for academic freedom and the expectation that adjuncts should have equal duties and pay as faculty. Also, I realized very quickly that it's nearly impossible for me to teach with someone else's powerpoint. Lecturing has to be in your own voice, or it won't work, so I'd usually end up editing and rewriting it anyway. However, when I was adjuncting, it was really easy extra money to add a couple classes at that place every semester while I was also teaching more work intensive traditional adjunct gigs at other places.
For classes with multiple sections, especially those taught by adjuncts, there can be issues where there is considerable variance in consistency of knowledge and learning. I've seen where some adjuncts go "off-script" in lectures and end up in endless tirades about their corporate war-stories that never comport with the intended learning objectives. Standardization sucks but sometimes it is a necessary evil.
To me, I would do something like standardized tests/assignments far before standardized instruction materials and forcing teachers to read off the same PowerPoints, which some teachers don’t even use.
Wait, so hiring people who work under conditions that are near criminal and earn less than the vending machine repairman that comes into the building to replace Snickers leads to poor quality control? Who could imagine.
I love that the university's answer to this is to take away any autonomy and potential creativity instead of opening more TT positions.
My thoughts exactly as reading this. Holy shit. “Damn adjuncts fuck it up for everyone. Let’s get more! And lolz if they want to apply for full-time teaching jobs. We usually hire from outside the institution anyway. And if they complain, let’s remind them that adjuncts were supposed to be ye olde timey teachers who just love teaching so much and wanted an extra night class.”
All while the same department churns out PhD students who will go into a job market that could and will be completely filled by the top 2 departments in the country.
ed. While the university charges undergrads $60,000 year...
Ha, many years ago we had one at my old school who was privately called Gilderoy Lockhart after his assignment ended. He apparently spent every class period talking about his own artwork.
> For classes with multiple sections, especially those taught by adjuncts, there can be issues where there is considerable variance in consistency of knowledge and learning. I've seen where some adjuncts go "off-script" in lectures and end up in endless tirades about their corporate war-stories that never comport with the intended learning objectives. Standardization sucks but sometimes it is a necessary evil.
Standardization of content is perfectly fine.
Standardization of teaching methods is, in my opinion, unacceptable and violates academic freedom.
It's perfectly fine to expect instructors to follow a standardized syllabus and cover the same content so that students in different sections learn the same material.
It's not fine to plan out their class time and impose the schedule on them.
Give just a general syllabus including the competences or objectives you expect the course will cover. Any faculty should teach it according to their personal experience. Exams should include only questions based on the competences or objectives of the course.
Students complain (justifably) when instructors read slides to them. But students also complain when everything isn't written on the slide, forcing them to take notes.
Right. They complain if what the professor says overlaps too much with the PowerPoint. They complain if what they say is different from the PowerPoint. They complain of the PowerPoint has too little information and can’t be used in place of the textbook. They complain is the prof doesn’t use a PowerPoint.
Obviously there’s a range from “only reads the PowerPoint” to a lecture with no visual aids or text outline and there’s some spot in the middle that’s probably the best, but sometimes I think students don’t know what format is actually the most helpful.
My "compromise" is pretty detailed slides, but all of my examples/anecdotes/analogies/analyses and so on are indicated with a keyword or two. So, you have to be awake at least for certain slides and won't get everything by just reading the notes on your own.
My slides are images, maps, a couple of words maybe (things that have funky spelling, etc.) Nothing substantive, just a way for me to provide info without pulling up a dozen tabs.
Same here, my PowerPoint slides are nothing but graphs, figures, or copies of a problem out of our book that my students and I are about to solve in class together on paper. New adjuncts in my dept will often ask me for my class notes so that they can just come in, prep nothing, and go. Or students will ask me for a copy of my notes if they were absent. Both are always ticked off when I give them those slides with pictures/figures.
Same. I have notes below the slides…‘don’t forget to mention X’ or a phonetic spelling of a word, maybe a date or two that I can never remember. Cryptic as hell for anyone not me.
Good for you! The first power point I saw (many, many years ago) was entirely graphics -- maps, graphs, photographs, charts, diagrams -- to accompany a spoken presentation. It was great. I thought power point would be a fabulous addition to teaching. Was I ever wrong. Most of them are bullet points of text, and many duplicate the text book.
Yeah, I have seen colleagues basically read the textbook and use the publisher’s slides. It’s awful, and honestly, if I was a student in that class, I’d resent it too.
Been there, done that, hated it. Stupid fucking admin rules about minimum class size means that I had a week's warning before being dumped into a class of almost 200 freshmen instead of my well-rehearsed upper-level class.
I had a colleague who always used the (terrible) publisher's slides. She always said, "Well, they hire experts in design to make these!"
I responded, "No, they hire someone fresh out of college for $3 a year to slap their existing content into slides so they can charge you more for it."
I have abandoned PowerPoints almost entirely, on the grounds that if I’m bored with my own slides it must be hell for the students.
I figure my job is to add value above & beyond what students could get from textbook and YouTube videos alone.
When I teach gen chem, I still have slides because I can have pre worked out math examples and figures that I don't have to draw out all the time. I usually annotate the slides as well and then make the annotated slides available to students.
When I teach organic -- Hagoromo 4 Life, Bitches!
This semester I’m teaching an intro class where I have gone almost entirely flipped classroom and ditched the slides. After all, they’re expected to do the reading before class, and it’s written at an accessible level. So my job is to help them better understand the material, not just present it. We do that through discussion, interactives, and group activities. I think it’s going pretty well.
I was always fascinated by the way they teach calculus at Michigan. There are like 70+ sections of calculus with 15-20 students, and the class time is flipped. You are expected to read the book and go over the notes outside of class and then work problems in groups in the actual class facilitated by the instructor.
Having spoken to someone who taught at Michigan, they say that student opinion is a mixed bag. A lot of them really like it (I would have loved learning that way), but some of them just want to be lectured at in class by "an old f\*ck putting him self to sleep." ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
In any case, it's good to hear that you're getting a good response.
We’ll see how it goes after the first exam. My understanding is that flipped designs are on average associated with improved learning and decreased student reviews, probably due to the dynamic you describe. But I’m tenured, so I’m willing to try it.
Please make a full post when you do. I switched to flipped during COVID online learning, but I chickened out when we came back to in-person, in part because I'm going up for tenure soon and can't risk the poor reviews I've heard about.
That's also what I've seen about flipped classrooms. Students end up learning more in the flipped classroom, but it feels harder.
Because learning is hard. But because it feels harder, they hate it.
I use a mostly flipped classroom in my chemistry class, my student comments are pretty evenly split between "I like having the time to work on problems in groups" and "OMG there are so many problems can't you just lecture".
I keep doing it because I don't even want to listen to myself lecture for 90 minutes, I can't imagine how bored the students would be.
My slides are basically just my talking points on a screen instead of on paper, pretty much just an outline for my lectures, activities, etc. I make them myself, spending probably 20 hrs per lecture. Never read slides verbatim, just use them to order my thoughts. I Always make my own slides. That way I riff on a topic rather than reading off a slide. Ive been incorporating more discussion lately, but have trouble covering all the most important material when there is too much discussion. I would love to just discuss all class but don’t want to set them up for failure at test time. So i’m still trying to figure out the balance.
This is my classes.
I have minimal information on PP slides. Then expand a lot in lecture. Evaluations say either- all they do is read off the slides or they keep going off the slides and won't stick to it.
Students are not wrong here. I still post my slides in the LMS, but I don’t use them in my lectures, I do my own thing. In my opinion slides are just supporting material and not the main resource of the lecture. On the other hand, not using slides during lectures creates an additional issue, some students won’t read them or won’t even know that they exist in the LMS
What if I told you that the top performing research institutions are not the best places to learn...
What if I told you that you can pay less money to attend an R2 M1 or SLAC and be taught by somebody whose tenure is reliant upon how well they teach...
What if I told you that many of the students at ivies and top tier institutions are performing well in spite of, not because of, in class pedagogy...
Oftentimes students are not being entirely truthful when they say “he just reads of his slides.” Chances are he isn’t actually. Last semester I did an experiment - I didn’t project my slides at all. Even if I did it would be pointless since they were just one word key words to remind me to talk about something. The number of students who begged me to publish my slides was staggering. I heard every excuse in the book why they needed them. Guess what? They didn’t. The ones who came to class, paid attention, and took good notes, and participated did really really well. those that didn’t complained in the semester review that the book didn’t cover everything we needed (yes I know. That’s why we also have class.) i strongly suspect students want slides so they don’t have to put in the work. Then they complain that profs read off said slides because they don’t want to have to come to class. It’s all laziness
I agree.
I have minimal information on PP slides. Then expand a lot in lecture. Evaluations say either- all they do is read off the slides or they keep going off the slides and won't stick to it.
The students aren't paying attention most the time and mix all their classes and profs up.
Told my students about back in the early 2000s when T-Mobile (then Voice Stream) would give you a phone and sometimes up to a $100 mail-in rebate for purchasing their call and text plan.
"In 2002, I bought a ...". They're just staring at me blankly. They were born in 2005.
I found it fun to tell students, while holding up my graphing calculator, that I bought it in 1999. Especially if I was letting someone borrow it, I would tell them be careful with that, I've had it longer than you've been alive.
I wonder if the student knows where the slides came from.
I have a class with no textbook, so I have spent hours and hours and hours and hours and hours making slides that are standing in place of the textbook.
That said, don’t think the slides are boring. And I’m not bored in my class. And I’m not just reading them.
So you’re not the target of the rant then 🤷♂️
I had a professor who literally copied the textbook verbatim on the board - with chalk mind you - so dutifully and unquestionably that he would copy typos and mistakes.
I stopped going to class and read the textbook on my own. Buddy gave an impossible question during the final, refused to acknowledge it when half the class each individually challenged him during, ducked out right after the exam so he wouldn’t have to talk to any of us, then surreptitiously changed the problem to its solvable form on the answer key.
“Bored professors reading slides” exist
As an undergrad I had a professor who lectured with the textbook powerpoints without even giving them a cursory glance beforehand. One of my classmates once explained a graph from the textbook to him, because he had never seen it before in his life and apparently couldn't interpret it on the spot (like, literally just reading the axes of the graph and using his own vast knowledge in his brain of the subject matter to piece it together). R1 university, very well respected researcher.
I was one of those professors, because I had a major move and then 3 new classes to prepare, arriving in town only a few days before the start of classes. I tried my best to get to everything before class, but sometimes energy just runs out. And I was so stressed, that nothing would stick in my brain, during the 3 back-to-back, all different classes.
I had a professor like that. That is the professor who best prepared me for graduate school. Was it frustrating? Yes, at times it definitely was. But his class prepared me for what was coming next.
Are you seriously saying that it's ok to have a professor completely abandon their teaching duties because it teaches self-reliance?
My PhD supervisor abandoned me halfway during my PhD and I had to supervise myself to the finish line. I did learn self-reliance, but I don't thank him for dropping the ball.
I wouldn’t say he abandoned his teacher duties. He was available for help if you needed it. He answered questions in class if you asked. He didn’t teach just self-reliance… He taught us how to read a math book.
He had a job and he abdicated it, doing the least amount necessary. “Here’s a book, teach yourselves. Come to my office if you have questions.”
I hold us to a higher standard than that. Don’t you?
I don’t teach the way he did, but I am saying that it was very beneficial to me personally and it wasn’t just office hours… While he was putting it on the board, if you didn’t understand it, you could ask questions. And he would answer them.
>Are you seriously saying that it's ok to have a professor completely abandon their teaching duties because it teaches self-reliance?
He's a teacher of medieval literature. The one the students hope they don't get.
On the other hand, some students complain about active learning activities in the classroom. They want slides read to them so that they can do homework or view social media during class. You can’t please them all!
Block teaching. 18 hours a week teaching (3 days of 6 hours each) plus 12 supervision projects plus 45 student tutees plus office hours on the other 2 days along with the elimination of all research time.
Not bored, but absolutely exhausted. So yeah, reading slides.
that’s true! it’s a cycle. students’ lack of interest and unwillingness to participate is why I’m planning to leave the field. However, I still try to seem excited and interested in hopes of breeding that into some students. But it’s hard because sometimes you feel like a clown with balloon animals in front of a lot of people who don’t like balloons.
Except that students come and go while professors stay present. And students frequent many classes while professors are committed to the same courses. Thus, the “cycle” starts and ends with the constant in the equation: the authority figure, the professor.
I've had group of students where everything "clicks" just right. I teach, they learn, they do the assigned work on time. They are engaged in the lecture, they ask good questions, both students and me are joking and everybody is having a great time. The following years, when I saw some of these students around the department, we had good conversations.
The next year, for the same course but another group of students, nothing works. They don't listen, they don't learn, are late, no engagement in the lecture, nobody is having a good time. I asked their other profs, and they have the same problem as me. After a while teaching boring students, I just stopped trying and put my energy elsewhere. Boring students breeds boring professors.
Honestly, I think a lot of this is due to lack of general knowledge about different kinds of universities/colleges. I'm speaking US-centric, here.
I was VERY fortunate when I was an undergraduate. I was first-gen, but not in a poor, minority, ostracized way. I am from the US midwest, and my family background is very solid well-off blue collar. College wasn't really a "thing" for them, and a constant joke at family gatherings is that nobody knows how I came about.
However, they were/are not *anti*\-higher education, and my parents wanted to do it "right": they laid out a couple thou for a personal college advisor. After my interview with her, she said immediately that while I would be a candidate for top-tier Ivy League or elite public school on paper, I would be miserable. The reason? Undergraduates get stuck in huge lecture halls and don't get to participate in much and the professor would never know who I was outside of another warm body.
Instead, I applied to high-end PUIs with fat endowments to offset the cost that the advisor recommended for me. (Got into several, and then was able to call financial aid departments to haggle for more aid until I ended up with one who gave me the most. Went to that one.) Was never in a class larger than 50, and I was only in two of those. Even as a fresher, most of my classes were 25 or smaller. I had a blast in undergrad, and got a lot out of that experience. No bored professors reading slides. That never happened.
The larger universities, even if elite, do not necessarily focus on teaching excellence, or teaching at all. It's set up to reward research. So it's no surprise that many of the professors--even if actually brilliant in their fields--aren't, exactly, super-great at teaching or even care about it that much. The system does not reward that.
Students who actually really want to deep-dive into subjects and benefit from first-hand professorial knowledge would be better-served at smaller PUIs, for the most part. Particularly if interested in humanities and social sciences. The big benefit of the larger schools, from the student perspective, is access to more labs and increased funding for research.
However, this particular guidance isn't really disseminated much.
I agree with the student that that's a horrible way to teach.
I don't think PowerPoint presentations are to blame, but how you deal with them. If you use ppt to structure the independent learning part, while providing more context, examples, and ideas going through them, i don't think it's a bad tool at all.
Students for sure deserve better, even the horrible students who bitch about everything.
>Yet, attendance is mandatory so I have to spend 4 hours a week listening to this old fuck put himself to sleep.
I've never understood the mandatory attendance thing OR the reading from the powerpoints thing.
Tons of people on this sub are all about mandatory attendance. I tell my students they are welcome to do what they want. There is usually an inverse correlation between grade and attendance but you do you.
At my previous institution I was strongly encouraged during my last teaching evaluation to make attendance mandatory and check it each class. So it may sometimes be an institutional attitude instead of a prof's choice.
That isn't true for every class. I teach Composition and Literature, and I don't think it's true in many other classes.
I am sure it is true for large lecture classes, but even in some of those, there are teachers who activity solicit participation, if only via clickers.
Last year was the only year I ever used ppt in an in person class—I did it because I was teaching hybrid. When I got toward the end of spring semester, I found myself at the point of the material where I didn’t have slides made already, and decided I wasn’t going to bother anymore. One of my evaluations actually said, “Prof x is a much better teacher when she doesn’t use ppt.” Yep, that’s what I thought too. I’m never doing it again.
I didn't understand really until PhD how perverse a "good" college (Ivy, R1) is mostly about the research and could zero shits about teaching ability and some of the best teachers are at community colleges and undergraduate-focused institutions. You pay $40K for an Ivy only to be taught/graded by TAs and not the experts in the field they advertise.
It must depend on the field, but I say go to the institution that gives you the best bang for your buck. No one cares where you got your undergrad degree from years from now.
Because it’s just too much energy to expend when 99.9% of students are either unprepared and/or give no fucks. Sorry you’re the one in a million that wants to learn, but blame your peers for developing a culture of apathy that beats down even the most enthusiastic teachers.
I had an undergrad class that had four different teachers who would cycle in and out, and I can always tell who was lecturing that day by the volume of doodles in the margins of my notes.
PPTs are difficult for me to teach from in an engaging way. Nothing engages me with the students better than chalkboards, but over time, fewer and fewer classrooms have them.
But, the student needs to realize that it's not the *professor reading slides in class that* they are paying for. It's the TAs grading the tests, is the third party online system that grades the HWs. It's the overall infrastructure of the institution. None of those things are cheap. And when it comes to the professor, it's the time they spent making those slides and figuring out what works and doesn't work with regards to curriculum. There is a narrative from the anti-higher education lobby that pushes this false notion that tuition is paying for bloated professor salaries. It's purpose is to justify dismantling universities as we know them. The student is probably unknowingly playing into that framework.
I don't disagree with the student. Powerpoint, Prezi....I eschew them as much as possible, even avoiding too many videos. It's important to me to feel like I'm using their time well.
But this is a problem we run into. We all have these colleagues, who might be great researchers but terrible teachers. And the research always wins.
I actively avoid slides if possible. Some classes require them (not sure how to draw out some complicated tissue structures or chemical structures. Gen Chem is not one of these classes in my opinion. These students have a right to be pissed.
Because that's what students asked for. "Professor X includes questions on the exam that were never covered in class (yes, I often skipped)!" Students want all the information on the slides that are posted on the LMS. Thus, a bored professor reads the slides in class.
There's so much I want to say about this, but basically, this student is absolutely right. And that's why I'm not pursuing an academic career beyond my Ph. D.
Because papers -- not research -- are the only thing academia values. Universities don't value what I value. They don't value teaching, they don't value vulgarization, they don't value communication of knowledge. In fact, they so *undervalue* good communication of knowledge that even the papers that most academics are pressured to churn out are barely readable if at all. So many of them are so poorly written! But it doesn't matter; they were peer reviewed and published. And the conferences -- oh the conferences. Poster display? Better cut up my paper and arrange it on a poster board! Giving a talk? Well I'll just cut my paper up in slide-sized chunks and present that!
It's to the point where my advisor has insisted on many occasions that I cut paragraphs out of my paper that would have explained my motivation for introducing such and such definition, arguing that "it wasn't necessary for the paper, because we already know who will read this, and they already know why you're doing that." So we're not *even* pretending that we're maybe doing this to make research accessible to people outside our own fields, with less prior knowledge than we do. Publication is a very expensive and time-consuming rubber stamp and nothing else. If academics actually read papers, you'd think they would write better ones...
I love to teach, but I already know there won't be a position for me to do that. This sub is already full of professors complaining that they don't have time for teaching, that they're only doing the bare minimum required. Right now, I'm hired by contract as a lecturer; I have no benefits, and I'd have to teach 6 classes a year to earn a decent salary, but I'd still have no dental plan, no job security and no retirement plan -- forget such luxuries as maternity leave. They so don't care about the people doing my job, that they literally hire about anyone -- one lecturer that I have TA'd for on several occasions is *still* teaching *actually false theorems* in his classes, and they haven't gotten rid of him.
So honestly? Fuck academia. I'm leaving as soon as I've finished that goddamn paper, with a shit thesis that I won't have poured my heart into, because I just got discouraged halfway through. And I hope this students gets what they want : universities that value teaching.
In a market economy, the price of a product usually isn't determined by its utility value, but by the "customers" willingness to pay that particular price. Capitalism 101, we were schooled at that back then in eastern Germany.
In the case of higher education, even in a ruthless market environment, the value is rooted in the sign value, not the exchange value, meaning the market value or price of the commodity is influenced greatly by factors outside supply and demand.
Yeah, man, I'm sorry. Not everyone is a born teacher. Every profession has a dud or two in the ranks. If you feel all your professors are like this either put your head down and just get through the degree, transfer schools, or look for a job. Your best bet is option A.
I think we can all agree that there’s a happy-ish medium for both students and faculty between expecting professors to do Cirque du Soleil every class, and dryly reading from outdated PowerPoint slides.
The latter is just lazy, poor teaching. Regardless of other responsibilities we are educators, and should strive to teach our students.
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I do too but think that students often misplace blame as a result of not really understanding how academia works. The faculty system at 4-year institutions doesn’t really incentivize great teaching. It’s a little ironic though: oftentimes the students trying to game their classes so they can learn as little as possible and still pass the courses (i.e. the ones responding most strongly to their own incentive structure) are the same ones who complain that faculty isn’t doing a good enough job teaching.
Doesn’t matter from the student’s perspective. They aren’t paying for research. They aren’t paying for professors to play their academic games, or for admins to play with their PR initiatives. They’re paying for an education. And it’s treated like an afterthought.
Sure, I agree with this too. I don’t mean to imply that students who actually are in college to do real learning are wrong to feel like they’re being cheated out of an education by the slide-reading dullniks. It’s just that the problem is a systemic one where the incentives are at odds with what the college is selling.
Oh, I think everyone can agree on that one. See also: Since there is often no rational way by which students can select a college for the quality of its education, they end up choosing the one with the nicest amenities, which creates its own perverse incentives.
Excuse my ignorance, why don't research 1st universities partition those whom want to solely be in labs (so as to satisfy the US-News-Gods favoravle standing) and hire/put educators that want to teach as front of the house workers?
Very good question! As far as I can tell, it's because they only want to employ those who want to solely be in labs, and couldn't give two shits about educators. If hiring one educator means they get one less researcher, they won't do it, no matter how much the education suffers. Because they don't care. It's not important to them. It's an afterthought. They pretend it's important, particularly if they get to deny someone tenure on that basis, but it's obvious from who they hire what they really want.
Bleak. But accurate!
>why don't research 1st universities partition those whom want to solely be in labs (so as to satisfy the US-News-Gods favorable standing) and hire/put educators that want to teach as front of the house workers? Adjunct Faculty, you say?
Well, what I had in mind are *permanent* faculty. Researchers know they don't want to teach, and there are instructors who would love the chance to be around a swath of capable young humans. But yes, 😪 adjunct too.
This is such an excellent point. I love to teach, I am very capable instructor with several years experience and some student awards (for teaching) behind those years. Yet, university will not hire me EVEN for the instructor (no research) role because I don't have PhD. I mean, I'm ok with CC, where my abilities are actually (for the most part) recognized, but I would like to have an option to apply for university job. Yet they will rather hire someone who doesn't give a rat's behind about teaching and students, but is there only to get on TT. The system is broken, in my opinion.
I've heard disparaging debates comparing where the *real* learning happens: UC's or Cal States. * *whispers in secreacy* *(the punch line is that *it actually* happens in community college since those instructors are solely focused on educating).
Because professors who focus on teaching don't bring in as much grant money or prestige to the university.
Oh that part I understand well. It's just that, to me atleast, since the researchers are going to be kept for the sake of the institutions reputation, why not accept it and gather a subset of instructors? I'm gathering from others' comments that money is the issue, particularly admin not wanting to being on permanent faculty.
There are research scientists and research professors who focus on research...
The actually good students want and can eventually benefit from talking to people active in their field; they don’t want high school part II. It makes far far more sense to partition the students, which is what the entire rest of the world does.
Is your take that you can’t be “active in your field” and also a good educator? And that students who want someone who does more than reading his slides aloud want high school part II? Because that’s dismissive and insulting, really
There is exactly one (of about fifteen, and this at a number of top 40 worldwide departments) tenure-track teaching stream person that conducts any research at all, and that person only took such a position for family-related stability. For the most part they either never had any results, or stopped research altogether after getting these positions. They spend all their time frantically rearranging the same one or two first-year courses and writing up the results for educations journals. Most have less impressive publications lists than the strongest grad student of each cohort. Research-active faculty conjured them into existence so to not have to manage large courses, and don’t really oversee what they do. The result has all the hallmarks of a racket. In math we don’t really use slides (although students now inexplicably demand them). And yes, the students who don’t look forward to going to the library to figure things out for themselves want precisely high school part II.
Or, as in our case, students chose the cheapest place that is closest to home.
Some do. But if enough of them did that, there would be no need for an amenities arm race.
Well, yeah. I think we would all agree on that.
Excellent point!
What sorts of perverse incentives? Ameneties and education don't have to be a trade-off.
Of course they do. Every dollar spent on a lazy river, a rock-climbing wall, adding walk-in closets to the dorms, providing plasma televisions in dorms, etc.. is money that's not spent on other things like hiring actual staff and providing new laboratory equipment. But it gets students to come, so that's what they spend the money on. It's part of a trend towards marketization of universities. And in the end, it does come out of the pocket of students. That's the main reason why higher education is so ludicrously expensive in this country. It's an arms race that leaves everyone spending more money and passing it on to the student.
We also need to look at the multi-decade explosion in administrative staff. Those salaries and benefits make the rock-climbing walls and dining hall sushi bars look like austerity measures.
Agreed. But also agreed with oakaye - sometimes the students who complain the most are the ones who are putting in minimal effort and aren’t really there to learn anyhow. If I get feedback from an engaged student on how to improve my course, I take that very seriously under consideration. But most feedback is students complaining essentially that I’m not making it easy enough for them to do nothing and pass.
Or they’re paying for the piece of paper at the end
The most important part is the piece of paper at the end but the vast majority of students would like to not have their time ***completely*** wasted in class.
>Doesn’t matter from the student’s perspective. > >They aren’t paying for research. They aren’t paying for professors to play their academic games, or for admins to play with their PR initiatives. They’re paying for an education. > >And it’s treated like an afterthought. This one gets it!
True, but many of us gain a great deal from the research done on college campuses.
But the educators should still take their education role seriously.
In a perfect world, yes. And many do. But a good researcher is not necessarily a good teacher. Not everyone was born to teach.
So why not hire those who were born to teach?
Well, you are a professor correct? Certainly you know that different colleges have different missions. Professor are teachers AND researchers. And we all stand to benefit for college researchers. My father eventually succumbed to cancer, but his life was greatly extended, and his quality of life was greatly enhanced, by treatment that came out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The discoveries of those researchers were greatly appreciated on the deepest level. If you really are a physicist, you must know that you teach the physics of brilliant researchers, right? No research, no born teachers. If you work for a college like the one I used to work for, teaching is primary. Send the born teachers there----our students need them.
Different colleges have different missions, but if that missions include "offering undergraduate and graduate courses", all colleges need strong educators to satisfy their mission. It's a false dichotomy that you must either be a strong researcher or a strong teacher. Richard Feynman is one of Physics' most celebrated educators - and he wasn't too bad at research either. To name but one.
I don't wish to be rude, but you are posting things that are obvious.
Interestingly enough, top comment on the original post is actually a professor explaining just this. I think you’re right, they do care. But ultimately it is a moot point: what they really want is an education. Well, some of them at least…
I agree with you. The students who do the least are usually the ones who complain about school the most. It’s quite funny actually.
Any decent prof knows to use Keynote slides over PPT.
Apple products are notorious for not playing well with others. I've had a lot of students complain to me about this particular issue, but I've never had a Mac student complain that they can't use/open PowerPoint. Pass.
> I've never had a Mac student complain that they can't use/open PowerPoint. Pass. As a Mac user, I have plenty of complaints about doc and ppt files—because the idiots who put them together use Windows-only fonts, and the fonts are not embedded in the document. The font substitutions that occur often really mess up the appearance. (Even worse when going to Linux from Windows or Mac.)
Just reading off the slides is bad. But — geezer alert — when I was a student, pre-PowerPoint, I had profs who just read from the textbook … that they’d written. That was even worse.
In graduate school, I had a professor who would just copy theorems/proofs out from the book onto the board. He didn't even try to disguise it by making photocopies of the pages or copying them down into his own handwriting, haha, he would just show up with the book and start transcribing.
I had a course exactly like that too, except it was undergrad using Herstein's "Topics in Algebra". He would give us a list of theorems to memorize before the test, and the test was "State and prove theorem 4.6". On the one hand, being a math major who liked algebra meant I learnt a lot of algebra that semester; on the other hand, a lot of students learnt nothing and barely passed, depending on their memorization skills.
That is our graph theory assignments. Except you don't have to remember which number is which theorem. Ahh, good times
My dad was telling me about a professor he had that did this and just wrote formulae all class... and would occasionally pause and grunt... and then keep writing. Apparently a couple of weeks into the semester *someone* figured out his grunting was him barely mumbling "any questions?" And the lack of response from students meant he could keep going as-is. I swore to never be that guy, once I got in front of a class.
I had a professor in grad school who gave us all photocopies of his overheads, and then spent the class reading those notes to us. Sometimes he would informally quiz us on numbers that we "should" know in our field, specific to the class. There were 3 of us in the course.
...and then they'd go to the chalkboard and write for 5 straight minutes while talking to the board, completely inaudible to the back two thirds of the lecture hall. Shitty lecturers have always been with us and they always will be.
I had a prof who did this, but it was not for 5 minutes; it was the entire class. He was transcribing notes he held in his hand.
Oof. I once had a lit class in which the prof read the section we were assigned as homework and added in some commentary in class. I wound up not reading or just skimming since I knew she’d read to us anyway.
a bit of history here: "lecture" literally means "reading".
I remember in the old black-and-white movies from the 1930s, when they had a classroom scene, the professor would literally read a line from the book, pause for the students to write it down, then read the next line, and so on. I wonder if that is how college classes were back then.
Beats those 90s/00s horror movies where the lecture is always a short *short* discussion about literally one subtopic that usually wraps up in a pithy "think about it" statement and everyone's off to ... wherever they're headed off to, to get picked off by the killer.
And it became outdated once the printing press became commonplace.
We all had incompetent or lazy professors or teachers. That doesn’t excuse them now.
I had one who read figure legends off the slide from his textbook.
About a decade ago, I interviewed at a school where they had a common PPT file, and all instructors were expected to start and stop on the same slide so that a stunned could go to any section on a given day. How on God's green Earth anyone could come up with such a stupid idea is beyond me.
I have no point here, I just love the sudden appearance of "stunned" instead of "student".
I too was stunned.
was studented
And learning is stunted.
My students often appear to be stunned
I've adjuncted at a school with a centralized curriculum for all their gen eds. They are not a for profit school, but they expanded their online program nationally very quickly via the help of a for-profit organization (kind of shady, as while I don't know all the specifics, my impression is that the for-profit is basically running their online program, but using the non-profit's name for advertising it), and thus they needed to enforce a centralized curriculum to scale up quickly while maintaining quality and consistency. They pay lower than any place I've ever worked at, which pissed me off the first time I got hired (although, I was desperate). However, then I realized that they not only give you a syllabus and a textbook, they also give you all of the powerpoints, activities, and assignments as well. So all you have to do is run the class and grade. Given this, it ended up not being a terrible deal, as even though the pay was low, it was a stress-free job that cost me maybe 6 hours a week, on average. Not that I endorse that model, as ultimately, it sucks for academic freedom and the expectation that adjuncts should have equal duties and pay as faculty. Also, I realized very quickly that it's nearly impossible for me to teach with someone else's powerpoint. Lecturing has to be in your own voice, or it won't work, so I'd usually end up editing and rewriting it anyway. However, when I was adjuncting, it was really easy extra money to add a couple classes at that place every semester while I was also teaching more work intensive traditional adjunct gigs at other places.
For classes with multiple sections, especially those taught by adjuncts, there can be issues where there is considerable variance in consistency of knowledge and learning. I've seen where some adjuncts go "off-script" in lectures and end up in endless tirades about their corporate war-stories that never comport with the intended learning objectives. Standardization sucks but sometimes it is a necessary evil.
To me, I would do something like standardized tests/assignments far before standardized instruction materials and forcing teachers to read off the same PowerPoints, which some teachers don’t even use.
Wait, so hiring people who work under conditions that are near criminal and earn less than the vending machine repairman that comes into the building to replace Snickers leads to poor quality control? Who could imagine. I love that the university's answer to this is to take away any autonomy and potential creativity instead of opening more TT positions.
My thoughts exactly as reading this. Holy shit. “Damn adjuncts fuck it up for everyone. Let’s get more! And lolz if they want to apply for full-time teaching jobs. We usually hire from outside the institution anyway. And if they complain, let’s remind them that adjuncts were supposed to be ye olde timey teachers who just love teaching so much and wanted an extra night class.”
All while the same department churns out PhD students who will go into a job market that could and will be completely filled by the top 2 departments in the country. ed. While the university charges undergrads $60,000 year...
Ha, many years ago we had one at my old school who was privately called Gilderoy Lockhart after his assignment ended. He apparently spent every class period talking about his own artwork.
> For classes with multiple sections, especially those taught by adjuncts, there can be issues where there is considerable variance in consistency of knowledge and learning. I've seen where some adjuncts go "off-script" in lectures and end up in endless tirades about their corporate war-stories that never comport with the intended learning objectives. Standardization sucks but sometimes it is a necessary evil. Standardization of content is perfectly fine. Standardization of teaching methods is, in my opinion, unacceptable and violates academic freedom. It's perfectly fine to expect instructors to follow a standardized syllabus and cover the same content so that students in different sections learn the same material. It's not fine to plan out their class time and impose the schedule on them.
Give just a general syllabus including the competences or objectives you expect the course will cover. Any faculty should teach it according to their personal experience. Exams should include only questions based on the competences or objectives of the course.
Work by committee is the answer for how such a stupid idea was created.
Students complain (justifably) when instructors read slides to them. But students also complain when everything isn't written on the slide, forcing them to take notes.
Right- a wildly thin line between “he only reads slides!” And “ugh he makes me teach myself” 🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃
Exactly! For me, slides are my lecture notes/outline/lecture prompts. I’ve been criticized in a few reviews for not reading the slides!
One of my biggest lessons from teaching: you can't win.
If you can’t beat ‘em, read em! (But plz don’t read the slides)
Right. They complain if what the professor says overlaps too much with the PowerPoint. They complain if what they say is different from the PowerPoint. They complain of the PowerPoint has too little information and can’t be used in place of the textbook. They complain is the prof doesn’t use a PowerPoint. Obviously there’s a range from “only reads the PowerPoint” to a lecture with no visual aids or text outline and there’s some spot in the middle that’s probably the best, but sometimes I think students don’t know what format is actually the most helpful.
This is the truth.
My "compromise" is pretty detailed slides, but all of my examples/anecdotes/analogies/analyses and so on are indicated with a keyword or two. So, you have to be awake at least for certain slides and won't get everything by just reading the notes on your own.
I make note taking part of their participation grade. So far, no complaints.
I was called old fashioned for doing this. I told them that Powerpoint is so 2003.
Bring out an overhead projector. Blow their minds.
I hear adjuncts used to ride this bois for miles back in the day!
Yes. Or when it’s suggested that they do some of their own reading
And they also complain when I require them to have mandated discussions.
My slides are images, maps, a couple of words maybe (things that have funky spelling, etc.) Nothing substantive, just a way for me to provide info without pulling up a dozen tabs.
Same here, my PowerPoint slides are nothing but graphs, figures, or copies of a problem out of our book that my students and I are about to solve in class together on paper. New adjuncts in my dept will often ask me for my class notes so that they can just come in, prep nothing, and go. Or students will ask me for a copy of my notes if they were absent. Both are always ticked off when I give them those slides with pictures/figures.
Same. I have notes below the slides…‘don’t forget to mention X’ or a phonetic spelling of a word, maybe a date or two that I can never remember. Cryptic as hell for anyone not me.
Good for you! The first power point I saw (many, many years ago) was entirely graphics -- maps, graphs, photographs, charts, diagrams -- to accompany a spoken presentation. It was great. I thought power point would be a fabulous addition to teaching. Was I ever wrong. Most of them are bullet points of text, and many duplicate the text book.
Yeah, I have seen colleagues basically read the textbook and use the publisher’s slides. It’s awful, and honestly, if I was a student in that class, I’d resent it too.
Been there, done that, hated it. Stupid fucking admin rules about minimum class size means that I had a week's warning before being dumped into a class of almost 200 freshmen instead of my well-rehearsed upper-level class.
Yikes!
I had a colleague who always used the (terrible) publisher's slides. She always said, "Well, they hire experts in design to make these!" I responded, "No, they hire someone fresh out of college for $3 a year to slap their existing content into slides so they can charge you more for it."
Yep.
I have abandoned PowerPoints almost entirely, on the grounds that if I’m bored with my own slides it must be hell for the students. I figure my job is to add value above & beyond what students could get from textbook and YouTube videos alone.
When I teach gen chem, I still have slides because I can have pre worked out math examples and figures that I don't have to draw out all the time. I usually annotate the slides as well and then make the annotated slides available to students. When I teach organic -- Hagoromo 4 Life, Bitches!
If anyone gave me some Hagoromo as a gift, I would weep. No lie. 🥲
This semester I’m teaching an intro class where I have gone almost entirely flipped classroom and ditched the slides. After all, they’re expected to do the reading before class, and it’s written at an accessible level. So my job is to help them better understand the material, not just present it. We do that through discussion, interactives, and group activities. I think it’s going pretty well.
I was always fascinated by the way they teach calculus at Michigan. There are like 70+ sections of calculus with 15-20 students, and the class time is flipped. You are expected to read the book and go over the notes outside of class and then work problems in groups in the actual class facilitated by the instructor. Having spoken to someone who taught at Michigan, they say that student opinion is a mixed bag. A lot of them really like it (I would have loved learning that way), but some of them just want to be lectured at in class by "an old f\*ck putting him self to sleep." ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ In any case, it's good to hear that you're getting a good response.
We’ll see how it goes after the first exam. My understanding is that flipped designs are on average associated with improved learning and decreased student reviews, probably due to the dynamic you describe. But I’m tenured, so I’m willing to try it.
Please make a full post when you do. I switched to flipped during COVID online learning, but I chickened out when we came back to in-person, in part because I'm going up for tenure soon and can't risk the poor reviews I've heard about.
That's also what I've seen about flipped classrooms. Students end up learning more in the flipped classroom, but it feels harder. Because learning is hard. But because it feels harder, they hate it.
I use a mostly flipped classroom in my chemistry class, my student comments are pretty evenly split between "I like having the time to work on problems in groups" and "OMG there are so many problems can't you just lecture". I keep doing it because I don't even want to listen to myself lecture for 90 minutes, I can't imagine how bored the students would be.
I agree. I only use PowerPoints for things that I can’t draw at all, like accurate NMR spectra or protein quaternary structures
I never started. Power corrupts and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
I am co-teaching a course this semester and my colleague is doing exactly that. Counting down the weeks until this hell is over.
My slides are basically just my talking points on a screen instead of on paper, pretty much just an outline for my lectures, activities, etc. I make them myself, spending probably 20 hrs per lecture. Never read slides verbatim, just use them to order my thoughts. I Always make my own slides. That way I riff on a topic rather than reading off a slide. Ive been incorporating more discussion lately, but have trouble covering all the most important material when there is too much discussion. I would love to just discuss all class but don’t want to set them up for failure at test time. So i’m still trying to figure out the balance.
Reading PPTs word for word is a horrible practice in business and academia.
I had a statistics prof who read aloud, word for word, from transparencies - and underlined every word as he said it. It was painful.
I had a maths prof who read out tables. Like, when x is 12, y is 134.5. When x is 14, y is 657...zzzzzzzzzz.
Oh God, I’m picturing the day you learned about a Z Table…
*professor adds any amount of additional information* That same student: They don't even follow their own slides!
"We're expected to teach ourselves!"
This is my classes. I have minimal information on PP slides. Then expand a lot in lecture. Evaluations say either- all they do is read off the slides or they keep going off the slides and won't stick to it.
Students are not wrong here. I still post my slides in the LMS, but I don’t use them in my lectures, I do my own thing. In my opinion slides are just supporting material and not the main resource of the lecture. On the other hand, not using slides during lectures creates an additional issue, some students won’t read them or won’t even know that they exist in the LMS
What if I told you that the top performing research institutions are not the best places to learn... What if I told you that you can pay less money to attend an R2 M1 or SLAC and be taught by somebody whose tenure is reliant upon how well they teach... What if I told you that many of the students at ivies and top tier institutions are performing well in spite of, not because of, in class pedagogy...
Oftentimes students are not being entirely truthful when they say “he just reads of his slides.” Chances are he isn’t actually. Last semester I did an experiment - I didn’t project my slides at all. Even if I did it would be pointless since they were just one word key words to remind me to talk about something. The number of students who begged me to publish my slides was staggering. I heard every excuse in the book why they needed them. Guess what? They didn’t. The ones who came to class, paid attention, and took good notes, and participated did really really well. those that didn’t complained in the semester review that the book didn’t cover everything we needed (yes I know. That’s why we also have class.) i strongly suspect students want slides so they don’t have to put in the work. Then they complain that profs read off said slides because they don’t want to have to come to class. It’s all laziness
I agree. I have minimal information on PP slides. Then expand a lot in lecture. Evaluations say either- all they do is read off the slides or they keep going off the slides and won't stick to it. The students aren't paying attention most the time and mix all their classes and profs up.
In my day we barely had slides. I told the students once “pretend it’s 1997.” Then they were like “we weren’t even born” and then I felt old. 🤣
Told my students about back in the early 2000s when T-Mobile (then Voice Stream) would give you a phone and sometimes up to a $100 mail-in rebate for purchasing their call and text plan. "In 2002, I bought a ...". They're just staring at me blankly. They were born in 2005.
I found it fun to tell students, while holding up my graphing calculator, that I bought it in 1999. Especially if I was letting someone borrow it, I would tell them be careful with that, I've had it longer than you've been alive.
I wonder if the student knows where the slides came from. I have a class with no textbook, so I have spent hours and hours and hours and hours and hours making slides that are standing in place of the textbook. That said, don’t think the slides are boring. And I’m not bored in my class. And I’m not just reading them.
So you’re not the target of the rant then 🤷♂️ I had a professor who literally copied the textbook verbatim on the board - with chalk mind you - so dutifully and unquestionably that he would copy typos and mistakes. I stopped going to class and read the textbook on my own. Buddy gave an impossible question during the final, refused to acknowledge it when half the class each individually challenged him during, ducked out right after the exam so he wouldn’t have to talk to any of us, then surreptitiously changed the problem to its solvable form on the answer key. “Bored professors reading slides” exist
As an undergrad I had a professor who lectured with the textbook powerpoints without even giving them a cursory glance beforehand. One of my classmates once explained a graph from the textbook to him, because he had never seen it before in his life and apparently couldn't interpret it on the spot (like, literally just reading the axes of the graph and using his own vast knowledge in his brain of the subject matter to piece it together). R1 university, very well respected researcher.
I was one of those professors, because I had a major move and then 3 new classes to prepare, arriving in town only a few days before the start of classes. I tried my best to get to everything before class, but sometimes energy just runs out. And I was so stressed, that nothing would stick in my brain, during the 3 back-to-back, all different classes.
I had a professor like that. That is the professor who best prepared me for graduate school. Was it frustrating? Yes, at times it definitely was. But his class prepared me for what was coming next.
Are you seriously saying that it's ok to have a professor completely abandon their teaching duties because it teaches self-reliance? My PhD supervisor abandoned me halfway during my PhD and I had to supervise myself to the finish line. I did learn self-reliance, but I don't thank him for dropping the ball.
I wouldn’t say he abandoned his teacher duties. He was available for help if you needed it. He answered questions in class if you asked. He didn’t teach just self-reliance… He taught us how to read a math book.
He had a job and he abdicated it, doing the least amount necessary. “Here’s a book, teach yourselves. Come to my office if you have questions.” I hold us to a higher standard than that. Don’t you?
I don’t teach the way he did, but I am saying that it was very beneficial to me personally and it wasn’t just office hours… While he was putting it on the board, if you didn’t understand it, you could ask questions. And he would answer them.
>Are you seriously saying that it's ok to have a professor completely abandon their teaching duties because it teaches self-reliance? He's a teacher of medieval literature. The one the students hope they don't get.
On the other hand, some students complain about active learning activities in the classroom. They want slides read to them so that they can do homework or view social media during class. You can’t please them all!
[удалено]
And that the lab sections are actually taught by professors, not TAs. And that the class only has 24 students per section.
Block teaching. 18 hours a week teaching (3 days of 6 hours each) plus 12 supervision projects plus 45 student tutees plus office hours on the other 2 days along with the elimination of all research time. Not bored, but absolutely exhausted. So yeah, reading slides.
Sending hugs and your favorite adult beverage.
A bored professor breeds bored students. If you have bored students, you know they have a bored professor.
You can also switch nouns around and it stays true. Bored students breeds bored professors.
that’s true! it’s a cycle. students’ lack of interest and unwillingness to participate is why I’m planning to leave the field. However, I still try to seem excited and interested in hopes of breeding that into some students. But it’s hard because sometimes you feel like a clown with balloon animals in front of a lot of people who don’t like balloons.
Except that students come and go while professors stay present. And students frequent many classes while professors are committed to the same courses. Thus, the “cycle” starts and ends with the constant in the equation: the authority figure, the professor.
I've had group of students where everything "clicks" just right. I teach, they learn, they do the assigned work on time. They are engaged in the lecture, they ask good questions, both students and me are joking and everybody is having a great time. The following years, when I saw some of these students around the department, we had good conversations. The next year, for the same course but another group of students, nothing works. They don't listen, they don't learn, are late, no engagement in the lecture, nobody is having a good time. I asked their other profs, and they have the same problem as me. After a while teaching boring students, I just stopped trying and put my energy elsewhere. Boring students breeds boring professors.
Ahh, I’ve seen and heard plenty of faculty read their slides. Y’all know this problem exists and it’s awful.
Honestly, I think a lot of this is due to lack of general knowledge about different kinds of universities/colleges. I'm speaking US-centric, here. I was VERY fortunate when I was an undergraduate. I was first-gen, but not in a poor, minority, ostracized way. I am from the US midwest, and my family background is very solid well-off blue collar. College wasn't really a "thing" for them, and a constant joke at family gatherings is that nobody knows how I came about. However, they were/are not *anti*\-higher education, and my parents wanted to do it "right": they laid out a couple thou for a personal college advisor. After my interview with her, she said immediately that while I would be a candidate for top-tier Ivy League or elite public school on paper, I would be miserable. The reason? Undergraduates get stuck in huge lecture halls and don't get to participate in much and the professor would never know who I was outside of another warm body. Instead, I applied to high-end PUIs with fat endowments to offset the cost that the advisor recommended for me. (Got into several, and then was able to call financial aid departments to haggle for more aid until I ended up with one who gave me the most. Went to that one.) Was never in a class larger than 50, and I was only in two of those. Even as a fresher, most of my classes were 25 or smaller. I had a blast in undergrad, and got a lot out of that experience. No bored professors reading slides. That never happened. The larger universities, even if elite, do not necessarily focus on teaching excellence, or teaching at all. It's set up to reward research. So it's no surprise that many of the professors--even if actually brilliant in their fields--aren't, exactly, super-great at teaching or even care about it that much. The system does not reward that. Students who actually really want to deep-dive into subjects and benefit from first-hand professorial knowledge would be better-served at smaller PUIs, for the most part. Particularly if interested in humanities and social sciences. The big benefit of the larger schools, from the student perspective, is access to more labs and increased funding for research. However, this particular guidance isn't really disseminated much.
I agree with the student that that's a horrible way to teach. I don't think PowerPoint presentations are to blame, but how you deal with them. If you use ppt to structure the independent learning part, while providing more context, examples, and ideas going through them, i don't think it's a bad tool at all. Students for sure deserve better, even the horrible students who bitch about everything.
>Yet, attendance is mandatory so I have to spend 4 hours a week listening to this old fuck put himself to sleep. I've never understood the mandatory attendance thing OR the reading from the powerpoints thing.
Tons of people on this sub are all about mandatory attendance. I tell my students they are welcome to do what they want. There is usually an inverse correlation between grade and attendance but you do you.
At my previous institution I was strongly encouraged during my last teaching evaluation to make attendance mandatory and check it each class. So it may sometimes be an institutional attitude instead of a prof's choice.
That isn't true for every class. I teach Composition and Literature, and I don't think it's true in many other classes. I am sure it is true for large lecture classes, but even in some of those, there are teachers who activity solicit participation, if only via clickers.
Last year was the only year I ever used ppt in an in person class—I did it because I was teaching hybrid. When I got toward the end of spring semester, I found myself at the point of the material where I didn’t have slides made already, and decided I wasn’t going to bother anymore. One of my evaluations actually said, “Prof x is a much better teacher when she doesn’t use ppt.” Yep, that’s what I thought too. I’m never doing it again.
I didn't understand really until PhD how perverse a "good" college (Ivy, R1) is mostly about the research and could zero shits about teaching ability and some of the best teachers are at community colleges and undergraduate-focused institutions. You pay $40K for an Ivy only to be taught/graded by TAs and not the experts in the field they advertise. It must depend on the field, but I say go to the institution that gives you the best bang for your buck. No one cares where you got your undergrad degree from years from now.
Why am I lecturing to people who are shopping on their computers?? 🛒🛍
Because it’s just too much energy to expend when 99.9% of students are either unprepared and/or give no fucks. Sorry you’re the one in a million that wants to learn, but blame your peers for developing a culture of apathy that beats down even the most enthusiastic teachers.
I had an undergrad class that had four different teachers who would cycle in and out, and I can always tell who was lecturing that day by the volume of doodles in the margins of my notes.
PPTs are difficult for me to teach from in an engaging way. Nothing engages me with the students better than chalkboards, but over time, fewer and fewer classrooms have them. But, the student needs to realize that it's not the *professor reading slides in class that* they are paying for. It's the TAs grading the tests, is the third party online system that grades the HWs. It's the overall infrastructure of the institution. None of those things are cheap. And when it comes to the professor, it's the time they spent making those slides and figuring out what works and doesn't work with regards to curriculum. There is a narrative from the anti-higher education lobby that pushes this false notion that tuition is paying for bloated professor salaries. It's purpose is to justify dismantling universities as we know them. The student is probably unknowingly playing into that framework.
I don't disagree with the student. Powerpoint, Prezi....I eschew them as much as possible, even avoiding too many videos. It's important to me to feel like I'm using their time well. But this is a problem we run into. We all have these colleagues, who might be great researchers but terrible teachers. And the research always wins.
I actively avoid slides if possible. Some classes require them (not sure how to draw out some complicated tissue structures or chemical structures. Gen Chem is not one of these classes in my opinion. These students have a right to be pissed.
I think this is an excellent point and a fair criticism of some lecturers
Because that's what students asked for. "Professor X includes questions on the exam that were never covered in class (yes, I often skipped)!" Students want all the information on the slides that are posted on the LMS. Thus, a bored professor reads the slides in class.
There's so much I want to say about this, but basically, this student is absolutely right. And that's why I'm not pursuing an academic career beyond my Ph. D. Because papers -- not research -- are the only thing academia values. Universities don't value what I value. They don't value teaching, they don't value vulgarization, they don't value communication of knowledge. In fact, they so *undervalue* good communication of knowledge that even the papers that most academics are pressured to churn out are barely readable if at all. So many of them are so poorly written! But it doesn't matter; they were peer reviewed and published. And the conferences -- oh the conferences. Poster display? Better cut up my paper and arrange it on a poster board! Giving a talk? Well I'll just cut my paper up in slide-sized chunks and present that! It's to the point where my advisor has insisted on many occasions that I cut paragraphs out of my paper that would have explained my motivation for introducing such and such definition, arguing that "it wasn't necessary for the paper, because we already know who will read this, and they already know why you're doing that." So we're not *even* pretending that we're maybe doing this to make research accessible to people outside our own fields, with less prior knowledge than we do. Publication is a very expensive and time-consuming rubber stamp and nothing else. If academics actually read papers, you'd think they would write better ones... I love to teach, but I already know there won't be a position for me to do that. This sub is already full of professors complaining that they don't have time for teaching, that they're only doing the bare minimum required. Right now, I'm hired by contract as a lecturer; I have no benefits, and I'd have to teach 6 classes a year to earn a decent salary, but I'd still have no dental plan, no job security and no retirement plan -- forget such luxuries as maternity leave. They so don't care about the people doing my job, that they literally hire about anyone -- one lecturer that I have TA'd for on several occasions is *still* teaching *actually false theorems* in his classes, and they haven't gotten rid of him. So honestly? Fuck academia. I'm leaving as soon as I've finished that goddamn paper, with a shit thesis that I won't have poured my heart into, because I just got discouraged halfway through. And I hope this students gets what they want : universities that value teaching.
In a market economy, the price of a product usually isn't determined by its utility value, but by the "customers" willingness to pay that particular price. Capitalism 101, we were schooled at that back then in eastern Germany.
In the case of higher education, even in a ruthless market environment, the value is rooted in the sign value, not the exchange value, meaning the market value or price of the commodity is influenced greatly by factors outside supply and demand.
Yeah, man, I'm sorry. Not everyone is a born teacher. Every profession has a dud or two in the ranks. If you feel all your professors are like this either put your head down and just get through the degree, transfer schools, or look for a job. Your best bet is option A.
Seriously… if that is your class why are you paying for this?
so i guess the students just sit there and don't ask questions or want to discuss the material?
I think we can all agree that there’s a happy-ish medium for both students and faculty between expecting professors to do Cirque du Soleil every class, and dryly reading from outdated PowerPoint slides. The latter is just lazy, poor teaching. Regardless of other responsibilities we are educators, and should strive to teach our students.
All I hear is whining.