I Teach Poorly Sometimes to Get Them Ready for College

I find it sad, but not odd. Many of my non-education college professors had no idea about the methods you could use to teach and so just lectured and had the occasional discussion. To change that would be to require professors to take classes in education. Occasionally you’ll find a great professor who can really get you to think, and not just through a term paper.

I cannot completely agree with your posting. I teach unergraduate and graduate courses in business at a private university in the NE – hard to get into, pretty high standards. For the first two years I killed myself preparing innovative interesting lectures based on case studies, recent cutting edge articles and best practices research. For 99% of the students it was completely over their heads and their feedback was that the class was too hard, took took much work and that they did not learn much. Fast forward — I switched to a text which contains vocabulary, caselets, discussion questions etc. The students are required to read the text and are tested on it. But I don’t discuss it in detail in class (20 inutes max) and they spend most of their time on how to apply what they learned. Those who don’t read the book (about half by the way in the average 40 person class which costs over $50K a year of their parents hard earned cash) are generally lost. Of those who read the text about one half participate in the discussion. So, for the rare 8 to 10 students who are involved in their education the class works well, for the 20 to 30 who prefer not to work very hard they have a text to fall back on to explain concepts. You might call that “teaching poorly”, I call it recognizing the reality of what University teaching is like these days. You might want to check out a typical college class to see what it really looks like so that you have a better understanding of why professors use the dreaded textbooks. My students who care about learning are prepared for the real world. College is not just about the class content. It is about learning to be analytical, to be insightful, to complete assignments without any followup from a professor or parent, to fight for a professor’s attention against other bright students. So, the best way you could prepare your students for college would be to interview a professor and ask EXACTLY what they do. “Teaching from a textook” doesn’t cover the wide variety of how I approach teaching, nor how many other professors approach it.

I teach the Microsoft Office Suite to high school students. I am always trying to find interesting or “fun” ways to teach them how to use the software but until they actually know where to click they can’t really do the projects. How do I get through all of the “pointing and clicking” without using the book? I at least go through it with them on the overhead but I know I am boring them to death!! I don’t see how they can do projects before they know how to use all of the tools in the software. Any suggestions?

You could not have expressed my views any better, Vicki! It is so frustrating that some college professors look down on high school teachers.

As one of those college professors undergoing reeducation (one workshop at a time) I remind everyone that “you can always tell a professor, you just can’t tell them much.” By and large, the professoriat learned by reading and lecture, so they teach that way. Students who can’t learn that way (most of humanity) are deemed “poor”, “not college material.”

At one of these workshops, we were invited to actually read a chapter in our textbook, and I found it stuffed with factoids and boxes and could see how it would be intimidating. Thus I am moving away from the text (although a significant number still want the text) in most of my classes. But this puts the burden on me to provide the “scaffold” for their understanding– I have to lead them through the “metacognition” (see what I learn in workshops?) necessary to understand the new ways of thinking I’m trying to get them to practice. And as another poster has pointed out, you get a lot of pushback when you do this.

My plea to secondary teachers is to teach math. I don’t know how much you can get away with and still meet those national standards “they” love to test, but most of my students can’t do simple algebra. This is a life skill, and I give them real life examples and test them on this, and the majority don’t come up to a middle school level. I point out that math is a language, and while you can visit a country and not speak the language and get something out of it, the visit is vastly more rich if you can talk to the people. Math is the language of the universe– if you don’t know it, the universe will do things to you that you could have anticipated, and will be a confusing place.

Keep rolling that rock uphill!

I normally love reading your blog, but this one left me speechless. How do you feel when we college professors say that sometimes we have to reteach everything that students should have learned before they got to college? When we have to teach more than three quarters of our students remedial English and math skills? When many students have never been asked to do any form of critical thinking? When our writing centers are begging for additional funding because students cannot write sentences with subject-verb-object or create research papers with theses and logical flow. My classes use a variety of technology (including wikis, blogs, video games, etc.), but, yes, we do expect students to be able to read text material (to help us meet state guidelines in the short 16 weeks that we have have with them, since we don’t spend every day together). I think we should all be trying to work together, rather than slinging mud at how we each have to work to provide the best education possible to our students (no matter their age).