Teaching Kids to Walk and Talk 27

Teaching Kids to Walk and Talk 27 Professors and universities are very concerned about the evaluations of the teaching of the faculty and these days websites (like www.rate- myprofessors.com) make a very public show of how badly received some professors are. The professors are concerned with how they ap- pear and whether they are liked and how all this might affect their salaries. They are not concerned with teaching effectiveness because they are not really teachers in their own minds. Let’s hear from an Ivy League professor (who also doesn’t want to be named): There are faculty here who study real-world phenomena and don’t know how to apply that knowledge to their own lives. We could teach students here how to make use of what we teach in their own lives, we just don’t. Right now the approach that is taken makes most of the information that professors impart useless. It doesn’t have to be that way. My colleagues here don’t even do what they are studying when they are out of the lab. They are not successful people in life. If someone studying memory had to remember something, would they make use of their own data? I doubt it. Many of our professors don’t realize that they may not know as much as they think they know. All these people assume that whatever they do is the best that can be done. When a child learns to walk, you cannot say you were very good at teaching her to walk. She would have learned to walk without your help, most likely. When you teach a child to play baseball, you can more easily say that you were a good teacher, but really who knows you didn’t screw him up with nonsense that it may take him years to undo? I was taught to step into the pitch in baseball and years later learned that what I was taught was wrong. College professors can be evaluated on effectiveness only if some- one knows what that means. Does it mean how well students do on exams? We can make easier exams then. Does it mean how many of them get into Ph.D. programs at Harvard or how many get good jobs upon graduation? That likely has nothing to do with the effectiveness of the professors. There are no measures that make sense, for a very simple reason. College teaching doesn’t make much sense in the first place. Lecturing HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023767