Spring Break
Drexel professors must be hired as educators, not just researchers
Aditi Dubey
Issue date: 9/20/07 Section: Ed-Op
- Page 1 of 3 next >
Drexel is infamous for having professors who don't make themselves available. If you don't know this already, you'll find out eventually one way or another.
Students realize this usually when they need a professor to write a recommendation for them for a job or a scholarship. They realize that no one knows them well enough to recommend them for anything.
Of course, this plays out in different ways in different majors. If you're an engineer, chances are that a lot of your classes are big, with a lot of students. If you're lucky, you'll have the professor listed on BannerWeb teaching you.
For a lot of other students, they never actually even get to see their professor's face, and the class is taught by a T.A. If your classes are big, more often that not, the professor uses PowerPoint slides for lectures, even for courses in Math and chemistry. Strange, right?
Yeah, it is. You can't really explain the derivation of an equation to students unless you do it in front of them.
You can put all the steps - in the correct order, hopefully - but that really gets through to about 2 percent of the class, most of whom have already seen or done the derivation before.
The professor has no time to give students individual attention, and if you're struggling in the class, go find your T.A. or someone at the Drexel Learning Center. Very few professors take the time to get to know their students and work with them to create a curriculum and course structure that benefits them the most.
It gets even worse when they make courses like organic chemistry fully online. If you were one of the students who had to do this, you'll understand what I'm talking about.
It just doesn't work. No matter how much your professor might know on the subject, most of it is lost when you're trying to learn complex nucleophilic substitution reaction by means of a bunch of arrows floating around on a streaming video. The advantage is that, yes, you can play it over and over again if you don't get it the first time. The disadvantage, however, is that if you have a question or if you don't understand, too bad for you. You can e-mail your professor and such to ask questions, but it's not the same as being in a face-to-face lecture.
Students realize this usually when they need a professor to write a recommendation for them for a job or a scholarship. They realize that no one knows them well enough to recommend them for anything.
Of course, this plays out in different ways in different majors. If you're an engineer, chances are that a lot of your classes are big, with a lot of students. If you're lucky, you'll have the professor listed on BannerWeb teaching you.
For a lot of other students, they never actually even get to see their professor's face, and the class is taught by a T.A. If your classes are big, more often that not, the professor uses PowerPoint slides for lectures, even for courses in Math and chemistry. Strange, right?
Yeah, it is. You can't really explain the derivation of an equation to students unless you do it in front of them.
You can put all the steps - in the correct order, hopefully - but that really gets through to about 2 percent of the class, most of whom have already seen or done the derivation before.
The professor has no time to give students individual attention, and if you're struggling in the class, go find your T.A. or someone at the Drexel Learning Center. Very few professors take the time to get to know their students and work with them to create a curriculum and course structure that benefits them the most.
It gets even worse when they make courses like organic chemistry fully online. If you were one of the students who had to do this, you'll understand what I'm talking about.
It just doesn't work. No matter how much your professor might know on the subject, most of it is lost when you're trying to learn complex nucleophilic substitution reaction by means of a bunch of arrows floating around on a streaming video. The advantage is that, yes, you can play it over and over again if you don't get it the first time. The disadvantage, however, is that if you have a question or if you don't understand, too bad for you. You can e-mail your professor and such to ask questions, but it's not the same as being in a face-to-face lecture.
Viewing Comments 1 - 1 of 1
Jean-Claude Bradley
posted 9/24/07 @ 5:30 PM EST
Since you mention my organic chemistry class I want to clarify things so that my current students don't misunderstand how it works. There is a fully online option, where students who absolutely cannot come to class can interact with me over email. (Continued…)
Post a Comment