Links for 8/25/10

J. M. Anderson

teaching is not that important. It won't get you a job, and it certainly won't get you tenure or promoted, even at most so-called "teaching colleges."…

Most of your colleagues will see undergraduate teaching as a burden to escape from whenever possible… they exploit the system and resent their students for not taking their courses seriously and interfering with their work…

If you care about teaching, you will be forced to choose between it and scholarship because you won't have adequate time for both class preparation and research. Something has to give, and invariably it will be your teaching because publications are the currency of the academic world. The more peer-reviewed books and articles you have, the more valuable you will appear to colleagues and administrators. You'll be told that there isn't a conflict between research and teaching, and that research informs teaching, but that's simply not true. Few undergraduate courses are based primarily on a teacher's original research, and very rarely does the kind of scholarship that gets published make its way into the classroom. You are trained as a specialist, you publish as a specialist, but you will be expected to teach more than your narrow specialty…

Kevin Carey

the question isn’t whether we’ll evaluate university performance with numbers. We already do that. The question is which numbers…

As long as we stick with the current accountability system, college will keep getting more expensive. Presidents will continue devoting their considerable talents to the pursuit of bigger-as-better. Quality, students and learning will continue to stagnate…

Henry F. Fradella

it is pretty clear that far too many college degrees aren’t worth the paper on which they are printed…

more than 60 percent of college graduates were not proficient in prose, document, and quantitative literacy…

college and university faculty members often lack the ability to teach basic reading, writing, and math skills. Why? Because most professors are not trained to do so….

instructors give up; rather than teaching the skills that should have been learned before students arrive in college, they focus on content because it’s easier to do so…

faculty members, especially those who are untenured, often fear setting course expectations too high, challenging students’ comfort levels too much, or being rigorous in their assessments of student performance. If students perceive a professor as being too hard, they will avoid that person's classes… part-time faculty members whose classes are canceled often find themselves without any courses to teach…

PATRICIA COHEN

Just this month, mathematicians used blogs and wikis to evaluate a supposed mathematical proof in the space of a week — the scholarly equivalent of warp speed...