Is it a professor's job to teach or to simply present the information?

Is it a professor's job to teach or to simply present the information?

Other urls found in this thread:

merriam-webster.com/dictionary/profess
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

to collect a salary and complain that it isn't enough of a reward for all your noble sacrifices

from my experience apparently their job is to read out loud the lectures summary word for word

Their job is to come in to work 30 hours a week, hang out in their office with their dogs, maybe read a manuscript or two, then write their name in as a prominent author on every article their underlings write for publication.

He must realize...that life has no meaning...then only then ...when living with that immense hole in his heart must he find the strength to move past that~

Why do weeaboos use that tilde at the end of sentences? Can anyone explain its meaning?

present ways of thinking about the material.

the biggest issue is that this requires the students to read the material BEFORE class, as opposed to after or never.

You must be from the Chicago Area.

From my experience it appears to be to just present the information. I am not sure that's a good thing, but that appear to be role.

I have never met a professor who actually acted like a teacher, it were always his assistants and students from higher semesters who actually acted like teachers.

You could probably teach a monkey to write the script down on a table, not sure why they force professors to do it.

kawaii uguu~~ 2D girls use it

is there any difference?

The difference is subtle. Basically involves explaining things intuitively, trying to level with the students, explaining things that they do and some of the motivations.

This is my experience. It is a shame. I learned much more from high school teachers than most of my professors.

The professor's job is research and sharing research data with other researchers. The lectures are only a side task and they indeed only present information to us.
Teaching is our own job. And TA's are there to assist us in that.

Neither.
Think of your professor like the manager of a store, the guy who gets the final say.

His job is to have the final say if any grading disputes occur, and anything else he hasn't delegated away to TAs. Basically it's his class.

He doesn't have to teach you, present information, lecture you, grade you, test you, none of that.
He just accepts liability and power in controlling his class. He doesn't have to do anything with it.

Example: I had a tenured professor who made us meet only 6 times during a whole semester, all on Saturdays, for about 50 minutes each. 20 minutes spent waiting for late students, 30 minutes spent literally counting rocks out of a plastic bag, then writing the number of rocks on a piece of paper he provided and then leaving. Got an A, obviously. No tests, no listening, no reading, no lecture, no learning, nothing. High end Ivy League university. Professor should be fired.

What's the difference?

In this thread, I think we've defined the difference as "teachers adapt to the competence of the class as a means of guiding it" while those who simply present the material do not, and consequently tend to interact far less or pay any attention to their students.
Pretty sure that's the meaning in this thread at least.

No, you're thinking of a researcher.

A professor must also teach. And should be expected to care about teaching to some extent.

Professors are researches. At least where I live, they have to fulfill a quota of publications or they lose their position.

>Is it a professor's job to teach or to simply present the information?

The professors employers are his students and he must do as they wish. Stuckup professors who cant accept this should be fired.

>50k in debt so you can teach yourself the material

Certification fees.

to help you learn

You're a slave

t. unemployed history graduate

Whatever it takes to pay the bills for me and my life.

Depends how much they can be bothered. I've had lecturers that followed a textbook and pretty much regurgitated it (cut down) on the board, lecture after lecture. But even within that, there is a scale. Some borrowed explanations from the book; others tried to rehash the information and add their own explanations. I would class that as the difference between simple presentation and teaching.

Assuming we're talking about those that lecture, I think that their goal is a set of learning outcomes that they would like you to fulfil. They (hopefully) know a lot about the specific topic and are trying to impart (the basics of) an understanding of the course. Depending on their style and the competence of the student body, they may simply present, or they may try to actually engage with the material.

If the topic is tricky/abstract, they'll have to work harder to get you through the necessary hoops. If the material is easier, they can probably present boards full of equations without much issue.

I also wonder if some struggle with the material themselves, but just follow a set of notes closely and hope they don't get found out.

At this point, now that I'm finishing up my math undergraduate, I've found I just don't benefit from going to lectures anymore. I do go, but it's 90% just to show the professor "see I attended your lectures" and make sure I'm in the right part of the textbook. All the actual learning I get comes from reading the books very slowly and looking online if there's something I'm not sure about. The lectures themselves don't help.

>I also wonder if some struggle with the material themselves, but just follow a set of notes closely and hope they don't get found out.

I had a math professor who would consistently forget some step in a proof he was writing, and stare at the board for as long as it took for him to figure it out. He would often try to come up with convoluted explanations that lead to nowhere.

Honestly though, the dude was pushing 80 years old. At that point your working memory goes to complete shit. It was obvious that he knew the material but just got tripped up on a lot of the weird steps some proofs have. I think it wasn't a matter of him not getting it, just a matter of not remembering every last detail.

God I fucking hate professors like that.

Same with TAs. Plenty of TAs and professors have this mindset that their mathematical maturity somehow makes them able to prove any theorem without already having it planned out and as a result they spent 90 minutes on a proof that should take at most 5 minutes. Or, in some cases, they just mess up and restart like 4 times.

I've had TAs and professors do this (yes, a TA took 4 fucking times and over 2 hours for a proof that was like 5 lines long because he didn't want to look it up) and then apologize profusely for it but do the same thing again next time.

Are you fucking retarded? You can have more than 1 function at your job.

this~

Yeah. The typical response is "you should be able to figure it out on your own". My professor would just assign where he got stuck as extra credit or something and then go onto the next thing. It's like no one understands that as a student, some of the material may be confusing.

Its their job to ecourage student understanding of state mandated concepts.

Teach obviously. A lot of ungrateful little fucks in this thread. Of course the professor won't change your diaper but he will try to explain the material to the best of his ability.

>Is it a professor's job to teach or to simply present the information?
Neither. It's a professors job to profess.
merriam-webster.com/dictionary/profess
>: to say or declare (something) openly
>: to say that you are, do, or feel something when other people doubt what you say
>: to believe in (a particular religion)
A professor's job is to declare to you what they believe. If they are a good professor, they will explain their beliefs to you using logic. If they are subpar, they'll either not explain it whatsoever or explain it in an illogical fashion. It is the student's responsibility to be able to follow logical thinking, and of course to know the necessary prerequisite materials or suggested reading.

I have had an Indian teacher twice now, for differential equations qnd linear algebra. She ALWAYS messed up in class examples. Like almost every class meeting. It got to the point to where we just wouldn't correct her. The examples were in the textbook and she would rewrite them in her notebook then try to work it from memory. She was the most stupid and useless math professor I've ever had.

If she didn't take attendance and give a grade for it then no one would go to her class.


For differential equations it wasn't too bad cause that shit is easy. For linear though it was miserable. I feel like I learned nothing in that class.

>For linear though it was miserable. I feel like I learned nothing in that class.
That's because there's nothing to learn in that class in the first place.

Eh, maybe. Im an EE major and, honestly, I have no idea why it is necessary for me to know what most of the shit I was taught in that class. Why the hell do I need to know why a subspace can be a subset of a vector space in some specific circumstances? What does that do for me?

Honestly, I'm not even sure how mathematicians would use them.

That class was a prerequisite for our DSP class, but I don't know why.

Their job is to TEACH, whether some decide to do it or not, is irrelevant. Thats the ethics from the professor, not the job itself.

thanks op. golden question.

A professor is a researcher + teacher.

How hard is that for you to grasp?

>Why the hell do I need to know why a subspace can be a subset of a vector space in some specific circumstances

For numerical methods. You'll see the application of it once you start. If you're working with huge data sets, knowing how to manage and categorize the sets and their relations is essential to getting the fastest calculations. It only seems pointless because you're working with tiny sets, or general hand-wavy examples.

I see. So this will probably be useful someday for me as I will be starting graduate school in January for antenna theory/ electromagnetics

Teach. But they prioritize trying to get the material out there, because you can ultimately fail at getting your point across thus not teaching anything in the first place.

I'm not sure how high-end universities are but out of at least the biology department here, the professors at my local university, they generally kind of tend to do both.

In lecture (what OP is talking about) they try to present the information first and foremost, because they know that not everyone will get their point. But, most of them do make an effort to do more than just read off a presentation. They actually try to explain shit in a down-to-earth manner. Vids, going over journal articles, etc. We even did diaphonization of tadpoles in my animal physiology class. It's pretty nice compared to the awful "learning experiences" I've read on here and elsewhere.

I've had some shit professors though. Physics professors was a chink that couldn't speak English to save his life. Psych professor was retiring the following semester and gave zero fucks. Of course I got A's but the chink got fired and the retiree just was riding it out.

tl;dr: they should teach but it's a mixed bag.


If you really feel like you haven't learned just meet them during office hours and ask them to explain one on one.

Nah I'm from NYC doing grad school in AZ, chemists everywhere see the blatant spotlight thievery. I got invited to "co-write" a chapter in a textbook with my PI and in my experience that means I write it and he edits it for correctness and puts his name on first. Same goes for best author spots on papers.

>If you really feel like you haven't learned just meet them during office hours and ask them to explain one on one.

>tfw when professor's third language is english
>can't understand what he is talking about during office hours

In my experience, they lecture set content they've written and sourced for an hour, commence 6 hour hands-on work experience on content they've generated and tutor along with their PhD or Masters students, assisting and expanding knowledge where required.
They also come in on weekends and stay back until up to midnight on weekdays assisting and teaching those who require it.

They also commence and complete their own research which PhD's and Masters usually assist with in conjunction with their own research, ever chasing the next grant.

Maybe I'm a unique case, but that's our guys.

...

>You could probably teach a monkey to write the script down on a table, not sure why they force professors to do it.

"Doctor" is old Latin for "Teacher." In Ye Olden Days, you weren't considered skilled in your field until you could teach it. (Note that e.g. almost all the famous philosophers of ancient Greece were tutors to the children of the wealthy.)

Of course that means that the word Doctor becomes a high-status title. Everybody wants the high-status title - and are willing to pay money for it - so now it no longer means "somebody so skilled that they can teach," but instead "somebody who has, for at least one semester, talked to a group of people without being responsible for whether they learned anything."

It's part of the large general shift from universities as academies to universities as accreditation mills. Five hundred years ago, if you want to LEARN something, you paid a Doctor to teach you. Today. if you want a job that requires a piece of paper that says "He learned something," you pay a university to give you a piece of paper that says "He learned something," actual learning not required, therefore actual teaching not required, but the puppet theater still has to take place.

Incidentally, to OP: A professor OUGHT to teach, because "present the material" can be done by a reading list of five books. The reason you have a human involved OUGHT to be that you need something that cannot be gotten from a book - that is, teaching.

>Teach obviously. A lot of ungrateful little fucks in this thread. Of course the professor won't change your diaper but he will try to explain the material to the best of his ability.

>I have never had a bad professor who thought the "teaching" part of the title Ph.Teacher was merely a formality keeping him away from his research.

Well congratulations I guess, but bad teachers exist. I have had some amazing teachers and I've had some terrible ones who should never have been granted the title, there is a marked difference.

Don't forget to sell their own textbooks to the students.

Other ways in which Athens is superior: Dem GAINS. The modern professor is a stick figure, the ancient Athenian has shoulders so wide and cut you could use him as a Ionic Column.

But that's literally not true......
You can't lecture unless you're an internationally recognised person in your field with, at minimum, a PhD, giving you the title of "Doctor".

From there, once you've significantly contributed to the field you are an "Associated Professor" and only those who are distinguished in the field with significant contributions to their field are allowed the title "Professor".

The only title higher is "Sir".

Not all lecturers are Professors, almost all Professors have or are teachers.

>But that's literally not true......
>You can't lecture unless you're an internationally recognised person in your field with, at minimum, a PhD, giving you the title of "Doctor".

That is literally not true.

I could go lecture well before I got my PhD. I could lecture in first grade. What I couldn't do was get a job as a lecturer at an accredited institution. This is a very important distinction that's getting lost in your analysis.

Well, I suppose you got me there.
I presumed we were discussing purely accredited universities with an international recognition though. You know, the only one's potential employers take seriously.

So to get to the part that I actually cared about but absentmindedly left out:

>Not all lecturers are Professors, almost all Professors have or are teachers.

Wrong.

Almost all Professors have been or are employed to stand in an auditorium and speak to a crowd, no actual teaching required.

Almost all Professors have a piece of paper, on which is says in latin: "Teacher."

Owning that piece of paper does not actually prove you a person who has taught. It proves you a person who has been, standing in a lecture hall talking at people.

Saying "But that's literally not true" without quoting isn't helpful when I'm making several claims unless you trying to say that all my claims are false.

But here, let me list my claims numbered, you can tell me which ones specifically you disagree with.

0: "Doctor," from latin "doceĊ" meaning "I teach," means "Teacher."
1: "Doctor" is a title people will pay to get, even if they don't like teaching.
2: "Teaching" and "Standing in a lecture hall talking at people" are not the same. Specifically:
2a: "Teaching" requires that afterwards. the people involved have learned something
2b: "Standing in a lecture hall talking at people" has no such requirement.
3: Getting a PhD requires 2b, not 2a.
4: This means that having the title "Doctor" is not a proof that you can teach.

>I presumed we were discussing purely accredited universities with an international recognition though. You know, the only one's potential employers take seriously.

We were.

>
>>I presumed we were discussing purely accredited universities with an international recognition though. You know, the only one's potential employers take seriously.
>We were.

Or, you know what, if you want to be uncharitable and interpret me like I'm an idiot instead of somebody talking about a slightly complicated subject whose point you haven't grasped yet, we can do uncharitable instead.

Here:

>"Doctor" is old Latin for "Teacher.

>But that's literally not true......

Well you're literally wrong you double niggerfaggot.

They were outdoorsy types.
Also, without the advent of cars, people had to ride other people to the slave department everyday.
>History is fun!
>The More You Know!
*Rainbow...and...STAR*

It should be to shape personality of students and make them enthusiastic about studying and aid them both intellectually and emotional about how they feel and how should they feel about the field of study.

Other wise if you just want rational, statistics and data just read a textbook without the teacher.

>my definition of teaching is such that only whoever I specifically choose is a teacher

fuck off

Learning is something that an individual has to do more or less on his own.

Here's a flaw in your argument: You're conflating someone who has a PhD with a professor.

Speaking of teachers, am I the only one who has a hate for any type of professor no matter how good or bad they are? Maybe high school teachers essentially gave me a bad impression of them, but I do not even try to talk to any of the professors at a university. Some are cool and I see many students be cool with them, but I just cannot deal with them. I prefer just doing my work and hope I can leave without having to deal with them. Is there a reason for this? Anyone else like this?

Most math professors I deal with are unbearable. They try to act like hot shit because they got a Ph.D but, like most people who pursue math, they are all wimpy nerds deep down. They show bias towards the women in the class, because they probably never got laid until 30, and they can't talk to men at all without sperging out.

Is this pic real?

Is everyone ITT a child? A professor's job is to research first, teach second. The question posed in the OP entirely hinges on that one crucial premise. Professors research. That's the point of getting a ph.D over a master's. You can be a doctoral lecturer who 'just' teaches or you can be a professor.