The first thing that comes to mind when we think aboutincompetent professor is that he is always referring to his "cheat sheet". I have seen a few of these types; a variation of this is when a teacher prepares a lecture, memorizes it and then retells the contents in class. Seemingly he is presenting the subject-matter without a cheat sheet, but his knowledge is rather shallow and he has difficulties answering questions. If a student insists on obtaining an answer, he is risking to be targeted for retaliation. Such teachers may well make an issue if a student tries to present the material differently on an exam, as compared to how it was presented in class.
On an exact-science course, a professor has to produce every derivation, every formula, which are within the scope of a course. But descriptive courses are different, their scope cannot really be limited by a certain number of pages or words, and overall, their scope can be much wider than the number of spoken words a teacher can realistically say in class; because of that, a teacher can follow an easy survival tactics by devoting more classroom time to the SIMPLE things, while saying very little about the COMPLEX ones. Seemingly all areas of the course have been covered, and yet the students are not getting much guidance from such a teacher.
When I was going to a nursing school, our anatomy / physiology teacher was following this tactics; she was often occupying classroom time with tests, each of those would take some half-hour, she would then talk about organizational matters, by that time there will be very little time left, just enough to say a few dozen words on the subject.
Here is a typical example of it: when she was talking about the functionality of the spinal column nerves, the presentation was quite literally at the level - "people, who had limbs amputated, often experience "phantom pain" and it is driving them crazy!"
But, of course, she would take care to have in-depth questions on an exam; a person who had not seen her in a classroom, would have all the reasons to believe that the course is being presented in depth.
It takes lots of time and effort to prepare the exam questions, but professor is free to work with books, while doing that, plus this job needs to be done only once.
She was, obviously, aware that students are not stupid and they can see the reasons behind this way of organizing the teaching process; and she had delivered a subtle warning to us on the very first class - "If someone would try to make fun of my name, you are a dead meat!"
She said it as a joke, smiling all along, but the message was clear enough. A college professor can give so much troubles to a student that it is much safer to keep quiet.
As for those parts of the course which only required memorization, such as the names ofbones, nerves, arteries, veins, there were no tests during those classes, and no organizational matters, it was all easy stuff, a great opportunity to show off.
Another teacher had arranged an even better deal for herself, she has divided the course content among all students, each one was supposed to prepare his part and to deliver it to the class in the form of a presentation with the "audio-visual" materials and to be prepared to answer questions at the end.
The teacher was sitting at the back, listening; in the end she would make an overview, point to the better and the weaker parts of a presentation, invite the input from students, ask some additional questions and then the next student starts with his part.
The high-school courses are very primitive, teachers there do not need to resort to cheating, but the college and university courses can be very complex, a weak teacher has no choice but to use various survival tactics.
Nursing programs are rather notable with this regard, the teaching staff there consists of nurses, who worked their way up to the teaching positions. Nursing teachers are in hospital several days of every week, supervising students in their clinical practice, during the rest of the week they teach classroom courses.
Nurses do valuable work, no question about it, but still, they do not have the intellect of a doctor. Can a person like that realistically teach complex courses, such as pharmacology? Most likely he or she would have to resort to some survival strategy, to cheat, maybe even to intimidate the students, I have seen enough of it during my stint through a nursing school. No wonder, very few nursing schools offer pharmacology courses, the nurses they have on staff simply cannot do that. Inviting the visiting professors is not a solution, since then the nurses would not be able to log in enough hours.
Overall, when weak teachers are allowed to enter the profession, students are shortchanged, pardon for stating the obvious. They pay huge tuition fees, teachers get very handsome salaries and yet students are not able to use their teachers as a learning resource and thus are forced to do most of their academic work through self-studies.
I heard that in Germany students can force the educational institution to dismiss an incompetent teacher simply by holding a vote. Could that be the reason why Germany is so advanced in the field of science and technology?
Oleg Chmelev is the webmaster of http://tuneMind.net That site deals with the issues of intellectual performance and other things
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Oleg_F_Chmelev
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