My 26 yo son recently went back to college to get a degree that might lead to an actual job, and he is shocked at how awful the younger students are. They watch YouTube and TikTok videos in class instead of paying attention, they are openly hostile to profs’ teaching choices, they think they know everything when they clearly don’t know anything, everything is too hard, etc.
And some of the Profs are just as bad.
Covid blew a big hole in our educational system, and messed up that whole generation.
janus2@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
so many of my 100 and 200 level STEM classes were like this in no small part due to the instructors not wanting to teach. they were being forced to teach as part of their employment contract but their main work was research
i resented them for turning their lack of ability to get a position that didn’t require teaching into my problem because they refused to give the slightest effort towards actually explaining the material
doing problems from the textbook on the overhead projector with near-zero explanation is dogshit teaching
OwOarchist@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
At least yours were taught by actual faculty?
A lot of my 100 and 200 level classes were taught by grad students who were interning as teachers in exchange for free/discounted tuition.
Mirodir@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
At least yours were taught by actual people.
My girlfriend showed me recently that one of her profs made an AI clone of himself (voice and visual) and distributed prerecorded lessons that way. Who knows if he’s even writing the script for it. Probably not.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
or adjunt professors who would rather do research, which is about the same thing tenures do anyways.
Pickleideas@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That was the most jarring thing for me transitioning from a community/junior college to a private university. Pretty much every teacher I had in CC was there because they loved to teach, but didn’t want to teach children. In University it felt like everyone was teaching because they had bills to pay and had no concept of a world outside of school.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
I went to fairly small private college for Music, and all my music professors were really great, every one. Even the couple that were considered the worst were decent teachers, it’s just that some were amazing, and made everyone else look mediocre.
Once you got out of the Conservatory, and started experiencing other subjects, the quality was variable. I had some excellent profs, but also some fairly bad ones. The worst were the adjunct teachers who were only doing it for a side hustle, they generally weren’t too invested.
The_v@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I went to a very small public university campus that a few years before was associated with a massive state university. They were still mostly independent but we’re getting all sorts of pressure to conform to the larger universities policies on research etc. At my school the professors all taught and did little to no research.
As part of their ongoing arguments they had all juniors/seniors in both schools take a standardize tests at the end of their core degree courses for a year. My tiny university averaged 90th percentile. The large university averaged 30th percentile. The difference having highly qualified dedicated teachers.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
that was my CC too, unfortunately they taught like everyone should be ivy league level courses, too many people failed out and repeated the course, for stem, i suspect this was part of the scheme to keep students forever studenTs in the CC. AND THIER were quite a few that stayed there 5-10year+ with no direction in thier goals.
otter@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Even for the classes with excellent profs, sometimes I’d have to do the thing above.
If I had midterms or an important project in one class, I might have to skip the prereading / review for another class. After that, I’d get to class and not understand much of it. Then I’d catch up the best I could during weekends, reading breaks, or just during finals season.
bennypr0fane@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
And that’s how universities work, because who cares if it’s all just a giant farce, right? Gotta have the paper that says your smart.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
i had multiple professors like that 1 was animal physio, the PROFESSORS was actually doing research/lab during the whole semester so he was barely in class, and had the TA who had her own MS degree research to do, when the final came about, everyone was like wtf he dint mention any of this in the whole course, like actually chemical/energy equations that he never discussed in class.