One of the most tired genres of academic posting is complaining about your students. A lot of it is mean-spirited (how dare these kids not treat my exact passion with the seriousness I did!), but a lot of it is also just fucking lazy. Congrats, as a trained expert in your field you managed to nitpick a freshman to death, or discovered that they (gasp) skipped a reading.
@Zeb_Larson Have you ever heard the idea that the people campaign for political offices are not the people that you want running those offices? The idea is that the skills you need to campaign are not necessarily the ones you need to govern. I sometimes feel the same way about academia - the skills you need to get through a PhD select for many who shouldn't be in a classroom. Or, the people who can do research are not the ones you want teaching young people.
@seanbala@Zeb_Larson@academicchatter Yeah it’s a little bananapants to me that you don’t have a research track and a pedagogy track. There are a lot of researchers who hate teaching and a lot of good teachers who just go through tie motions of “publish or perish.”
@MisuseCase@seanbala The problem is that there’s very little prestige wrapped up in the teaching track among the people who train grad students, and there’s such an oversupply of PhDs as is. It’s a sick game.
@Zeb_Larson@MisuseCase 1000% agree to all of this. I work at a public university and I like to shock my students when I tell them that only 1/3 of their instructors are actually full-time professors. The rest are grad students and adjuncts. At least in the US, the problem is that the gap between the first group and the second group is SO WIDE.
@Zeb_Larson@MisuseCase I've always wished that there could be a middle ground created of "Lecturers" whose job is to teach, they are paid a reasonable teacher's salary, and do not have a research burden. They can be paid a bit less but not poverty wages like adjuncts.
But you are so correct that there is no "prestige" in teaching. Or, better put, that many people who get through the gauntlet of a PhD are those have been taught that there is no "prestige" in teaching.
@Zeb_Larson@MisuseCase When I contemplated a PhD (still thinking about it but on the backburner), I got such poor mentorship because I was more excited about teaching than research. Mentors started acting like I wasn't worth the time.
@Zeb_Larson@academicchatter That is not to say that I'm not sympathetic to those problems that come from teaching. I used to teach university courses and I loved so much of it. But I remember encountering that archetype of academics who were brilliant with research but loathed students with a burning passion.
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