College core: you sit in the class for attendance then go home and teach yourself

https://lemmus.org/post/21111758

so many of my 100 and 200 level STEM classes were like this in no small part due to the instructors not wanting to teach. they were being forced to teach as part of their employment contract but their main work was research

i resented them for turning their lack of ability to get a position that didn’t require teaching into my problem because they refused to give the slightest effort towards actually explaining the material

doing problems from the textbook on the overhead projector with near-zero explanation is dogshit teaching

That was the most jarring thing for me transitioning from a community/junior college to a private university. Pretty much every teacher I had in CC was there because they loved to teach, but didn’t want to teach children. In University it felt like everyone was teaching because they had bills to pay and had no concept of a world outside of school.

I went to a very small public university campus that a few years before was associated with a massive state university. They were still mostly independent but we’re getting all sorts of pressure to conform to the larger universities policies on research etc. At my school the professors all taught and did little to no research.

As part of their ongoing arguments they had all juniors/seniors in both schools take a standardize tests at the end of their core degree courses for a year. My tiny university averaged 90th percentile. The large university averaged 30th percentile. The difference having highly qualified dedicated teachers.