NYU Professor fired for making a class "too hard".

It's a downward spiral. Education is one of the few "industries" where the customer demands & seeks low quality goods.

 

Nope. Michael Hobbes already took this apart. He was incompetent. Thread

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1st micro class in grad school. First test. Prof comes in places a quarter on every student's desk. Still has not passed the exams back. Eventually, someone asks about the quarter. He sez, call your moms & tell her you aren't gonna be economists. Today he'd be fired (not, cuz of tenure) for disrespecting students & not caring. He cared very much. But the caring police are rigid fascists that would not know real caring if it was a razor in their jack boots.

 

unfortunately, I no longer have an NYT 'script. I don't think I can see this 1 arg. I'd like to. In part, cuz, a lot of times incompetent profs are deemed that based on what I call the HSisation of college. Years ago, my college had a 2 day seminar on becoming a "master teacher". like 1 from my dept went. chair sent an admonishing email (out of duty, not conviction). I responded that I did not become a college prof to be a master teacher. HARD STOP. research unis are about learning, not teaching. Show up to learn. Not to be taught.

 

Organic chemistry was the hardest class I ever took, total weed out class, the first day the prof said something like half of.you will drop this class ... He was right.

 

I don’t have a subscription either. But I read the excerpts in Hobbes’ tweets and others. Hobbes even said it was unclear exactly what happened, but the article did not support the headline or the conclusion. But it was hard to argue with some of the statistics in there to suggest that he was just fired because he was being too tough. It looked just like “kids these days” Clickbait

 

I was unfortunately a dept chair. There were 2 profs that got, by far, the worst student evals. I would mingle with former students at all kinds of events. Without fail, the students of these 2 profs, would divulge how much they owed to these two for preparing them for their lives & careers. I relayed that to them & I included it in their annual evals. much to the dean's chagrin.

 

I am not disputing any of that. And it could be what’s in effect here.

But if so, they should’ve actually investigated it instead of just taking a rambling unsourced piece that drew conclusions without actually looking at the data or doing any other interviews. If the story is important enough to run, it should be actually reported.

But the data stated that his reviews were not only the worst in that department but in any other social sciences. And when he said 82% of his students misread the question, that sounds suspicious. At a minimum, coming from journalistic perspective, they should’ve investigated more.

And I’m not sure how much the issue is how much he cares about his students but about his teaching competency. I don’t know how they evaluate that issue.

I’m not dismissing the possibility that he was mistreated. I’m just saying that the article does not support its thesis that he was, and the few facts it does include would lean towards the opposite

 

Ive heard that more than once. My cousin has his doctorate degree from UF in environmental engineering. He’s brilliant. He told me organic chemistry 1 and 2 were the most difficult and frustrating courses he ever had.

 

It is the job of the teacher to cause students to learn.

That’s been my motto for 15 years in Education

 

I've always thought that there is something wrong with educators who take pride in failing a relatively high percentage of their students. I'm not saying you should make it easy on students to pass, but if you're failing a bunch of students, you need to consider whether you're failing them as an educator.

 

Wouldn't you have a self-selection bias problem there?

 

There is a fundamental laziness of students and teachers with practically unlimited content available on YouTube, 3-D models, and software for Orgo now days. Exams are expected to be harder as a result. What I found infuriating about Orgo was it was both a new language and spacial awareness mind bender. Sadly not everyone is good at learning both simultaneously.

OT: Dr. Merle Battiste both destroyed me and saved me in his Organic Chem class at UF. I still have PTSD from his violent description of nucleophile “back-side attack”.

great guy. Loved Heineken beer.

 

My son took Organic chem 2 and Physics 2 at UF last semester, said he honestly didn't know how he made it through.

 

I am going to offer counter point here.

You are a researcher, and you clearly have training in research methods. Since you are also a teacher, why would you wholesale reject the idea of training in teaching methods? If scientific studies show that students learn better with approach X, why would fight against teachers using approach X?

I am with you on the teaching evaluation issue. I’ve been fighting for a few years with our college to remove the teaching eval scores as a component of our assessment for promotions. These scores are biased against all kind of teacher traits, including sometimes good teaching. Indeed there needs to be some standard for students. But like tampa suggested, there clearly needs to be a standard for teachers too. If they should be allowed to do anything with their classes, including reading the NYT all day and never responding to a student, why even have them?

Last note, I am a master teacher. In fact, my title used to be literally “Master Instructor”, but this title was shelved because people started to see the master part as racist. A topic for another perhaps.

 

I have to say I don't know what the heck you are trying to say. I'm pretty sure my college professors were teaching me as I learned from their classes. Strange rant.

 

He has been teaching for decades. Did he receive the same complaints?

Sounds more like a generational problem.

Young people can't handle adversity. Want everything dumbed down and made easy.

 

It is generally good policy for any organization to not set policy based on the whims of 18-23 year olds.

 

You have to adapt. Unfortunately. I've only been teaching 15 years and the difference in my first class and most recent class is night and day. But, you can still push them while meeting them where they are at... If your goal is truly to teach them. Sounds like this guy didn't share that goal.