I'm a professor

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That's pretty funny - it's taken me till spring break to understand this. But I teach at a university, and I'm not a graduate student; I was hired because I know enough about my subject to be useful and to invent a course. I had to train my students into calling me by my first name, and not "Doctor Tarantella" -- I don't have a PhD, and don't like the formality anyway. I have meetings with dept chairs and program officers to discuss the future of the course and a couple of new ones, and I have a stack of papers to grade.

The funny thing is I never wanted to be a professor, though I've had a lot of encouragement in that direction all along -- most recently from my late boyfriend, who wanted nothing more in the world than to be a tenured history professor. At grad-school age I thought the idea was nuts -- I was still a kid, what did I know? That's the wrong stage of life for standing in front of a class. Now, teaching, I wonder about the usefulness of the institution, I'm appalled by the kids' debt loads, and am not sorry that universities are going to have to change radically or die. I don't know how helpful I am to my students; if a strong idea lodges in their heads, then I guess the course did its job. I do know that halfway through the semester, I'm sick of the sound of my own voice, and am aware of how arbitrary much of what I'm saying is, also how impossible it is to transmit certain kinds of knowledge to the kids. I hope I'm not wasting their time. I'm glad tuition's low where I teach; I don't think I could keep going in and doing this if I were at some fancy lib-arts college charging $60K/yr. There's no reason to pay that kind of money for what I'm teaching.

What are you teaching?

I agree the system needs a change, but you are wrong to say what you are teaching is not valuable. It is highly valuable. I bet you will be a "professor" those students remember for the rest of their lives. I know I have a special place in my heart for the professors I had that challenged and believed in me and made the lessons come to life.

Indeed! I concur, and second the sentiments of teha_67, although, I understand your reasoning with regard to the issues you've touched, on. Much success to you! Your students are most fortunate. . .

I think teaching at a community college would be rewarding--especially sociology or English or philosophy classes. It would be an ideal way to shape the minds of the next generation.

I think community/technical college is the best approach to higher education in America. It is low-cost allows you to work, can live at home, and teaches skills that will get you a job when you graduate. Liberal arts is for people who already have a solid financial foundation, where it won't be tragedy if they don't get a high-paying job right after graduation. I don't think most people benefit from traditional college. It is more like high school (part 2).

Gosh, you guys are very kind. I teach science writing, though I do it in a way that puts me at odds, a bit, with science faculty -- they're academics, and in their worlds the really important thing's to be able to write a hot journal article or grant proposal for other scientists to read. They're very much concerned with sounding scientific, like members of the club, and at all costs avoiding sounding silly. (Which is part of why at this point they have real trouble understanding scientists two sub-areas over.) The kids I'm teaching are science majors, but very few of them, if any, will ever be tenured academic scientists running their own labs. So yeah, they need to be able to communicate with other scientists in their field, but they really, really need to know how to talk science to nonscientists and scientists outside their fields. And -- as these kids have been finding out -- it's not easy to do. Not easy to define audiences, figure out their levels of sci literacy, and figure out how to put across whatever science they want at a useful level.

I think mostly what they've learned so far is that there is no "general audience", and no immutable Paper or Proposal form they need to master -- that it really is all about knowing what you want to say, to whom, and why, and doing it clearly, intelligibly, and and politely according to whatever conventions your (well-defined) audience can handle at the moment. Also that as young scientists they exist in an economic, social, and historical context, which they need to be aware of, as they write -- that science wasn't always done this way, why it's done this way now, who pays for it, how that happens and why. In other words I'm steering them hard away from the idea that this is "technical" writing, and towards the idea that it's a set of conversations about something important.

There's a story in NYT today that reinforces something I was talking about with them last Wednesday -- I had them comparing a Linus Pauling paper with an important mol-bio paper from the 2000s, and Pauling's paper was readable while the other was impenetrable. Why? Well, maybe in part because Pauling got his money from Rockefellers, not NIH, and he had to be able to convince wealthy, eugenics-seduced nonscientists to give him money. So he knew how to talk science in English. I pointed out to them that we're headed back that way -- more and more science is privately funded -- and that it's a good idea to know how to talk to rich nonscientists. Big story in NYT about exactly that today.

It's tough for the kids, too, because they operate inside majors where they're being told "learn to do this science like an academic scientist, everything else is a waste of your time". Even though the faculty understand that the kids need to be able to write, they don't really want the kids to take the time to learn to do it well. And the kids are all anxious about grades, because without the grades their scholarships disappear and their grad-school chances drop, so they run around trying to please everyone, tick all the boxes. It's very different from arts and humanities.

Don't sell yourself short, teaching how to communicate isn't a waste of anyone's time.

I understand there's going to be pressure in the kids and on you that what you're doing is soft and unimportant, but that isn't going to be everyone. A lot will respect what you are teaching, and you, based on your skills. Because skills and outcomes are respected by scientists.

Unfortunately, it's gotten harder and harder for community-college profs. I have friends who've been teaching at cc's for decades, and the pay is terrible, the workloads keep getting heavier, and the freedom to really get in there and teach is disappearing fast. Mostly they're expected to do mass remedial high-school teaching -- some of their students really can't read -- at the same time they're supposed to handle the bright HS kids who're taking courses to get a jump on college credits. Adjuncts get paid horribly -- $2K for an entire 40-student course isn't unusual.

A guy was asking me if I'd be interested in teaching a MOOC (massive open online course) or continuing-ed online course, and I said sure. I think that makes a lot more sense as an ed model. (Than residential universities, I mean.) Low cost, and you can learn while having a life. I love what MIT's done with its free online-certificate programs. A lot of tenured faculty don't really dig it because it undermines the business model that supports them, also undermines their prestige. Right now their salaries don't depend on enrollment or the students' perception of the course's value; in a MOOC world, they will. And while it's really nice to be in an actual room with students, I've been doing business online and having friendships online for over 20 years, don't see the problem there.

Last edited by tarantella64 on 16 Mar 2014, 1:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Sounds to me like you are injecting them with a dose of reality, which is far more valuable than people trying to shove EVERYONE in the same teeny hole. Good job!

Which is exactly why it'll be a small miracle if the course survives! But I have them over a barrel for the next little while: I'm the only person in sight who knows how to do this stuff and isn't already working fulltime, and the university wants to tout its writing-across-the-curriculum prowess. Plus, because I'm so uninterested in hierarchies and looking fancy myself, I have no problem waltzing up to powerful/high-ranking people and talking with them about the cool stuff my kids are doing, and what I'd like to do, and then they get excited and tell my boss's boss to make it so. Which freaks my boss out a little sometimes, but seems to work okay so far.

It won't last forever -- they'll figure out how to institutionalize it, and then it won't be any fun -- but in the meantime these kids are really nice and smart, and the job pays pretty well. (For me. Actual grownups would not be impressed.)

Ha! That's the truth. It does help that I helped with some grant wins over the last year. So much of it is simple stuff - don't bury the lede, a paragraph is not a bag of sentences, parallel structure is helpful in not driving your reader insane, is this something all your panelists will understand, is this actually a strong proposal or are you sort of mashing together things you found in a drawer, etc.

I come across this issue a lot and often. One needs to understand one's subject incredibly well in order to make it sound simple and understandable to those without prior specialist knowledge of the topic and the jargon.

You are clearly doing your portion of the world a great service, so keep it up and well done!

Tailoring your message to specific audiences is a good skill to have. It can be the same message but worded differently as you have done.

I hope your course survives because it is needed now more then at anytime. Same conformity emphases is happening at the elementary and high school level with the "common core" curriculum. The name tells you difference is frowned upon. I was discussing this with people who
are teachers and they were saying the students and teachers are very stressed. The curriculum is at level to high for the grade level.it is mandated for. Teachers are just giving students answers to save their jobs and their schools. "Nightmare" was the word used often.

I am glad I went to school in the 1970s. The previous statement was something I never ever thought I would say because I despised school.