college professors should have teaching degrees
- signatures: 7
- signature goal: 1,000,000
I want to petition to make college professors get and education degree. There are to many professors out there that are knowledgeable about there topic but can't teach it. I have already have 3 college professors like this. This is only my fourth semester of college and i have ran into so many college students that are having the same problem. I think that a college professor should have to at least get an associates degree in education before being able to teach at a college. It is way to common that professors have there doctorate in something but don't know how to teach the subject they know. It does the students no good if the professor can't teach the subject you have to learn. They also have to figure out that different students learn different ways. This is one of the big reasons in my opinion that our education system is failing and we are falling behind on the education race in the world. So if you agree with me sign this petition and hopefully we can get things changed
The poor creature who wrote this was obviously on drugs. And so were his six buddies.
ReplyDeleteFine. I'll get a degree in teaching when students get a degree in learning.
ReplyDeleteI <3 You, Beaker Ben.
ReplyDeleteAmen, BB.
ReplyDeleteIt's awesome how many spelling errors there are here. Love it.
There is no such thing as as "associates degree in education" unless reading blogs like this one counts.
ReplyDeleteAside from that, I had the same immediate reaction as Beaker Ben: Perhaps more colleges should have mandatory acculturation courses in the first semester, "How to be a college student 101"
After the third misspelling, I came immediately to the comments. Glad you didn't disappoint me.
ReplyDeleteThe shame of it all: This illiterate creature's "opinion" matters when determining continued appointments to a professorial position.
My parents both taught and one of them currently teaches in a M.A.T. program in addition to their regular high school load. I'm a grad student, though I'm not headed for academia.
ReplyDeleteI think that some college professors could use more teacher training. I see great value in completing education classes and working with a mentor teacher. College professors generally don't have that chance.
On the other hand, some high school teachers could use more research/industry experience in their field.
There is a serious disconnect in the training and requirements for K-12 teachers and college professors. A person with a Ph.D. but not teaching certificate can't teach high school. A great high school teacher who would be perfectly capable of teaching college students the same subject can't make the leap.
Under the current system you have to choose: which graduate degree do you want? I'm not sure that's a good system.
I want to meet the asshole who started this petition and engineer him an additional waste removal tract. What an asshole!
ReplyDeleteHe's the type that shouts "I'm here to learn" whenever he didn't do his homework the night before and complains that his teacher's lack of a teaching degree is the sole cause of his "learning problems".
I might just have to check into rehab after reading this.
Computer, one iced Trattatino with two shots of rum, synthehol override EMH alpha 420.
Interested, I looked up this petition, and found that the first signer was author of a petition against +/- grades, which pointed me to this old discussion of +/- grades. Having taught at schools with and without, I miss them, and most of what's described as "potential problems" look like upsides to me....
ReplyDeleteI love the modest goal of a million signatures.
ReplyDeleteHes correct. I think they're to many professors who want students too learn how two right rite and not "Enough" who cares about students personal Learning Styles.
ReplyDelete(How's that?)
Clearly his junior high and high school teachers, with their degrees in education, did such an excellent job that we ought to bow down before him and them both.
ReplyDeleteWhen 23 years of education just ain't enough...
ReplyDeleteGet a job, kid.
ReplyDeleteI actually wish I'd had a bit more formal pedagogical training, so I didn't have to spend so much time figuring things out on my own. But I'm talking about a class, or maybe two, as part of graduate work in my field, or even an equivalent amount of not-for-credit mentoring/apprenticeship, not another degree.
ReplyDeleteBut what the petitioner needs, in addition to a remedial course in grammar and proofreading (or just a stronger incentive to apply what he has no doubt already been taught numerous times, by teachers with education degrees), is a class in adapting to professors' different teaching styles, which in turn will prepare him for dealing with bosses with different administrative styles.
Or maybe, in a few years he will write a petition asking that all bosses be required to take courses in supervising people with different work styles. Come to think of it, based on yesterday's vidshizzle, that expectation is already in play, if not on a petition.
I minored in Secondary Ed and the classes did help. In my 1st career I took courses in classroom management and such because I taught adult IT classes as part of my job. Some of that was useful. The most useful training was actually being in front of a class with an experienced teacher there as a mentor.
ReplyDeleteMA&M is probably right. A class that helps us teach high school students probably would be helpful. That's sad because we are teaching college students.
ReplyDeleteI actually DID have a class concerning teaching when I was a graduate student. All TAs that taught in the Basketweaving Department had to take it. It didn't matter if it was your first semester teaching or 10th semester, you had to take the one credit class. There were not that many TAs in the department, so the professor in charge of us was able to make it as informative the first time as the 10th. It was also a good forum to discuss as a cohort what was working and what was not. We also exchanged ideas of classroom management and other techniques.
ReplyDeleteOn a positive note, the place I teach has many opportunities for professional development concerning such topics as classroom management, assessment/evaluation techniques, learning styles, use of the technology, etc. Unfortunately, very few professors take advantage of these seminars and the ones that do are either sittng there to stick it on their resume for promotion (yes, I have seen them sit there like the lumps they claim to teach, text the whole time, and even outright say they are just there "because" and aren't going to do anything differently) or the other few in the room go to them ALL because they really want the information. This makes an average of, oh, maybe 10 proffies out of the thousands of full-time and adjuncts we have in the entire system.
Learning educational techniques isn't a BAD thing. Sitting and finding out what the research and students are saying isn't a BAD thing. We are supposed to promote learning, but many of us are unwilling to do so ourselves and we're just doing what we always did.
And just to correct Jonathan Dresner, yes, there ARE associate degrees in education. Many states will hire an AA in Edu before a BAEdu or MAEdu because they are cheaper.
Beaker Ben nailed this one.
ReplyDeleteMy problem with "learning education" is that there are some skills that are general -- assuming that you teach that way -- and there are a lot of field-specific issues that just don't get addressed by "best practices" developed in other fields.
ReplyDeleteOr to put it another way, I'm really, really tired of being told how to teach history by chemists and English profs.
And I am equally weary of being told how to teach intro A&P by ed majors and psychologists...I admire our English department.
ReplyDeleteThe guy is a weenie. Perhaps in the days of the silverbacks, no one got any pedagogical instruction, but now many grad schools offer some sort of program designed to help students (and current faculty) become better teachers. I got my master's over 20 years ago and my doctorate not too long after that, and both universities had teaching and learning centers even back then.
ReplyDeleteAs an aside, one can get an associate's degree in teaching. My college offers one, but I don't think it would do anyone here much good as the curriculum consists of the core, an "introduction to education" course that's about the history of pre-K-12 schooling, an "introduction to teaching" course that provides shadowing experiences of teachers in the field a student wants to eventually teach in, and a special math course for prospective teachers that focuses on topics such as weighted averaging, bell curves, GPAs, and test norming techniques.
EnglishDoc, I stand corrected. We actually offer something supposedly similar to our graduate students: a course called "Introduction to College Teaching" in which the students are supposed to shadow an instructor through a semester, be responsible for some of the class, assignments, etc. In reality, we mostly use it to give our Graduate Teaching Assistants course credit for their teaching duties, but sometimes someone takes it seriously and learns something.
ReplyDeleteProfessional development is as effective as any type of opportunity for self-motivated education. Most faculty who enroll in it are probably already pretty good teachers because they want to do their jobs well. The knowledge isn't sought by those who need it most.
ReplyDeleteA self-inflicted problem in some prof. dev. classes is that they highlight the latest educational research which often turns out to be wrong - just like the latest research in lots of other fields. Faculty dislike wasting their time.
@ Narf, without a teaching certificate, one can't teach in a *public* high school. At my private high school, we hire people with graduate degrees in their fields, not in education. In my department, for example, we want historians who can teach well, not 'Social Studies Education" majors with limited subject competence.
ReplyDeleteI'm not against teacher training, which can be very valuable, but the number of credits and amount of training it takes to become certified is absurd, and drives away good people. A good scholar can become a great teacher with only minimal initial training. Being thoughtful about your methods, paying attention to your more experienced colleagues, asking for help and being flexible are more important than the number of EDU credits on your transcript.
Here's an interesting essay by Malcolm Gladwell on teacher training (and NFL quarterbacks).
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell
The evidence that exists strongly suggests that learning styles are myths. Yet, learning styles and other BS are promoted by many faculty in education colleges. I'll get an education degree when education faculty get degrees in real academic subjects.
ReplyDeleteAt my university, students in the education college average the lowest grades in general education courses and average the highest grades in their major. Education faculty around here are morons without exception, and it is the same at many other institutions. The single biggest problem in K-12 education is the existence of colleges of education. Education degrees are worthless and demonstrate expertise in nothing. And I don't care if I've pissed off all the readers of this blog who have education degrees.
I took an Intro to Ed course as an undergrad when I was contemplating a career as a HS English teacher. It was a fucking joke, and effectively shut down any interest I had in secondary ed. If I'd had to take any more classes like that, I'd have drunk myself to death before graduation (and I went to an excellent SLAC).
ReplyDeleteMy best friend was an ed/French major. She graduated, and got a job as...a HS English teacher with one section of French. Who was more qualified for the job? (I'd spent a month in Paris and had taken 4 years of Spanish, so I feel safe in saying I could have taught HS French with a little prep time.)
I agree with Hyperbolic above--an education degree is basically bs. Every 5 years there's some new way to approach the same old problems, and then 5 years later they come out and say "Well, it turns out we were wrong/didn't control for the variables/ whatever and here, let's do something else..." Meanwhile the little flakes are getting less of an education than they did 40 years ago, and they get to college somehow and WE get to try to figure out how to help them stop being such self-involved assholes.
In the mid-90s, I TA'd my own sections of comp for a year (including course design, lecturing, and grading assignments) with NO training. And what do you know--I still managed to get my students to learn. Maybe I'm just magical that way.
Maybe we all are.
All I know is that with an MA in English and an MFA in writing and 16 years of college-level teaching experience, I couldn't get hired to teach HS English in my state without going back to get an education degree. I'm pretty sure hell will freeze over before that happens. Or the Rapture. Whatever.
I once had a student file a grievance regarding her grade. She cited, in addition to some outrageous claims notwithstanding, that she should receive a passing grade of "C" instead of an "F" because I was not certified to teach mathematics. She proposed an alternative if the grade would not be changed-a refund of her tuition.
ReplyDeleteMy department chair found this somewhat amusing, since I have undergraduate and graduate degrees in mathematics and had been teaching for a number of years in this particular institution, and, besides, only 2 F/T faculty in a department with 15 F/T faculty taught, at one time, in secondary school. He, the chair, was not one of those.
What this student neglected to mention to the committee hearing the grievance was the course met once a week for 14 weeks and she was absent five times, two of those absences was because she scheduled her vacation in the middle of the semester.
Needless to say, the committee did not rule in her favor.
I don't know how many Staff Development workshops I been forced to sit through where we've been told that "lecture is the most inefficient way to deliver content. Students retain only 27% [or some other dubious number]of what they hear in a lecture." Then we're encouraged to develop "collaborative learning groups" and "interactive modalities."
ReplyDeleteWhile I agree that there are other ways to run a class besides a straight lecture format, what always tickled me (if I was in a good mood), was these don't-you-dare-deliver-a-lecture workshops were always taught by--you've guessed it already--lecture.
Then there was the "Sexism in the Workplace" workshop led by a husband and wife team. He interrupted and corrected her at least once every four or five minutes and addressed her, in a voice absolutely dripping with condesencion, as "Honey" at least as frequently.
By the end of the hour, most of us in the audience couldn't tell if the presentation was a satire.
@Clarissa: Well, I wonder if the author of the petition is the same Dennis Malkowski as this one, who is an undergraduate: https://www.facebook.com/kenike619 . Note that his FB picture shows him drinking at a bar and one of his "likes" is "Going out and getting absolutely Charlie Sheened" (and then writing petitions?).
ReplyDeleteThe point about different learning styles is fair though. We are all unique and have our own ways of learning. I for one learn best if I am spoken to through a hand puppet with a British accent. However, not *one* of my professors was willing to teach using a hand puppet with a British accent.
ReplyDeleteThis is perhaps why I don't have a 4.0.
Wow, I'm surprised you don't have more support on this petition for you're quite right about many college professors. They have so much expertise in their field, and students are very eager to learn from them, but some of them just don't know how to or care to properly teach the material. I personally had to teach myself many of the subjects I learned in college. I basically showed up to get a grade. And as a Biochemistry majoring student, that took a lot of self-discipline.
ReplyDeleteIf as a student, you've done your reading assignments and worked over many problems to strengthen your mastery of the subject, and you still find you're not being taught anything in class, it is really quite unfortunate. But you still have to get good grades, so pay attention to the syllabus and make sure you thoroughly read and dissect all relevant material for your courses. If you can get tutors for the classes you're struggling in, that would be very helpful as well. That definitely helped me in some of my classes.
Presently in graduate school, I find that you certainly have to learn to teach yourself even more. Every now and then, my professors are helpful but for the most part my understanding of the material comes from self-discipline.
But no matter what don't give up. You'll be wiser for it.