Posted by Rick Denney on September 21, 2001 at 11:05:22:
In Reply to: Re: I need advise. posted by me on September 20, 2001 at 21:01:22:
Teachers are paid to present the material, not to be babysitters or cheerleaders. It is up to the student to learn. It is possible that a few professors really are brutal for the sake of brutality, but most of the time it is the students who have unreasonable expectations of bring treated "nicely." A student has the responsibility, though, of determining whether a teacher or a program is doing him any good, and he is free to take his tuition money elsewhere if it isn't. Customers have responsbilities, too. If a student finds himself always banging his head against the wall, and feels like he is being put under unbearable pressure, then perhaps he needs to relieve that pressure by yielding, which means finding another line of work.
A teacher who is a genius to one student may be a tyrant to another. I once took an advanced theory course (not music!) in grad school, and the professor was a renowned physicist of great experience and reputation. Despite the desperate struggling that marked my own limited progress through material what was really beyond me, I consider that class to be a turning point for me professionally, and what I learned there still sets me apart from my peers 20 years later. There was another student in that class who struggled much less than I did (the math in that class was horrendous and this fellow was a mathemetician), but he could never understand the underlying principles that the theories attempted to model. The professor allowed a bitch session at the end of the semester, and this student complained bitterly that the professor had not been a good teacher. The teacher then gently suggested that perhaps it was a problem with the receptor rather than the transmitter. This was a case where the student needed to be in another line of work.
One of my closest and oldest friends is a college professor, and he insists that it is the student's responsibility to learn and it is his responsibility to present the material. He resists the babysitter role, and he refuses to coddle his students, even though many of them seem to expect it. He is also the professor that the best students most respect in his school.
Funny, but now I think about it, I recall a phone call to my college professor friend (before he was a college professor) during that advanced theory class. I was complaining to him that the famous old professor was really just a mean old man, and my friend told me simply that just because I could not keep up with the material doesn't mean that it is the professor's fault. What a splash of cold water that was! But perhaps that was the real turning point.
So, were I a student under a professor I thought abusive, I would look at my own progress. If I'm making real progress, the enduring the abuse will be worth it. But if the professor is just abusing me because he is a jerk, and his abuse is not helping me improve, then it's time for me to get a new teacher or a new line of work.
Rick "thinking college is often--and should be--an intellectual boot camp" Denney