Ask a question to professor / TA

>ask a question to professor / TA
>"just read the book lol"

Tell me Veeky Forums, why exactly am I paying $20,000 a year if my professors don't even do their jobs properly and tell me to just "read the book"?

Why are you willing to spend 20,000 dollars if you're not willing to read the book?

Why don't you write a strongly worded email to them

If you are willing to read the book 20k is for the piece of paper not for learning

You are there to ask the professor question relevant to the reading. That is if you are dedicated enough to read and curious enough to ask a relevant question. If you don't bother with the reading, or are a normie who doesn't seek/want any actual insight, then shut up, fork over 20k, get a C, and graduate with your piece of paper.

tl:dr - Your prof doesn't want to waste time with you if you don't take the material seriously. When you slack off in your studies you are only failing yourself.

For a piece of paper that will help you get jobs

>TAing 500 students course
>queue to my desk is 30mins long during peak times
>half the students haven't even gone over slides or the wikipedia page or anything, just scribbled some algebra on paper
You'd be annoyed for stupid questions, too.

Fucking millennials don't know what the word struggle means, neither do they appreciate its benefits. Enjoy a life of impotent worthlessness.

For me I felt similar, i went to a decent uni and the quality of teaching was poor

lecture slides sometimes copied and pasted from textbooks, problem sheets taken directly from textbooks and lecturers that simply refer to the textbook for everything

for me I think in terms of quality of education standard unis are completely outdated and not worth the cost. Their only benefits are some external motivation and the fact that they're seen as legitimate by employers

Remember him and after graduation tell him he was a shit professor.

t. Millennial

>why exactly am I paying $20,000 a year if my professors don't even do their jobs properly and tell me to just "read the book"?

Because you are american. If you weren't american then you would be getting told to "just read the book lol" FOR FREE!

Jokes aside, there has not been one single time a professor has not been willing to hear me out and help me... FOR FREE!

Sounds like your uni is just shit

I had literally the same experience.

Had something similar happen.
>ask professor question
>get "did you use google?"
>feel like brainlet for basically paying money for what can Google can give

C means no job

>be a TA
>homework question is assigned by professor
>a problem exactly like the homework question with just a few numbers changed around is right in the book as well as in the slides
>students come in and essentially ask me to do the problem for them while not even putting 15 minutes of effort in themselves
>tfw students think they're paying $20k for TA's to earn a degree for them

>be a grad student
>reading paper after paper on my new research topic
>can't understand half of them, don't have the prerequisite knowledge
>there is no course offering, and there is no one to teach me
>have to find textbooks and teach myself, spending hours every day learning ridiculously complicated methods
>this isn't even special, everyone has to do this in almost every field
>wrap up a 4 hour morning study session as office hours begin
>students complain that the professor "can't teach" because they didn't instantly understand 100% of the chapter's material after one 50-minute lecture

To prove to future employers and universities that you read the book.

I guarantee you're a millennial and millennials have it harder than their parents and their parent's parents. They exist in a time of economic and social degradation, wrought by their parents.

>20k is for the piece of paper not for learning
and? that's literally why you are paying a college, because it is accredited to give you a piece of paper which holds tangible value.

>how do i do an integral
you should read the book to answer those kinds of questions

it's almost as if the people who wrote textbooks and supplemented them with powerpoint slides know what they are talking about. what a crazy concept

>He pays for University
Top kek

depends on the question you asked

No that should be the secondary purpose of University, first is to teach you how to think, inject you with skills and knowledge

And what are you gonna do when someone just lies about having a degree and saves 20k?

you realize that the people teaching you learn everything from books also?

Isn't this criminal? Isn't it a kind of fraud?

Good question. Why are you doing that, op? Why are you still doing that, right now? It's your money, stop spending it if the product isn't what you want.

>that second greentext
me too user ;_:

I have to deal with coordinating my unis parallel programming course. I'm not going to bother answering shit you can google, my job is to help you understand when you're faced with a non-obvious problem, and you've at least tried to help yourself. The worst is people who bother to go to my office and disturb me without having substantial questions

>should be

access to labs, a library, tribal knowledge, and machinery. the professors and lectures are just a small piece of it.

kys retard there hasnt been a generation that had to stuggle since the turn of the 20th century

>Already knew most of the stuff lectured
>Only asked professors question to go into additional details about material that wouldn't be on the exams
>If I didn't understand something from the book I would just google it before wasting Professors time asking something I could figure out myself
Stop being so helpless op, if you don't know something at work you can't ask your boss to explain it to you, learn to figure it out yourself

Serious question here, why would anyone pay to attend a university?

I'm TAing a physics class right now and let me just say that if you don't at least try to learn things yourself before coming to ask me questions, then you're wasting my time and you're wasting your own time.

I don't like closing up my books and putting away the papers I'm reading so that I can talk about adding numbers together for 2 hours at a time. I'd be more than happy to talk about physics with my students, but the primary reason undergrads come to a section is because their algebra needs work, or they don't know enough trigonometry.

If this is a common problem, couldn't you just hang a note on your door with references for elementary problems, or "ask yourself if you thought well about this yourself before consulting the TA"? Some sort of Captcha preventing student "bots" from entering?

Because there are hundreds of students in a lecture who are also paying $20,000 a year, and it's infeasible to coddle every single student.

not him but you'd be surprised how many people can bypass the metaphorical captcha and think their problem is unique or unable to be answered online.

>read book
>it refers me to some paper for details
>find the paper
>exposition heavily relies on results from other papers

If you are at that point, I do not think your TA would turn you down.

Well have you read the book?
You're spending $20,000 a year for an education to prepare you to enter a field that you will likely work for the rest of your life and you won't even read the fucking book?

You should be reading the chapters covered in lecture BEFORE the lecture, if the lecture does not answer any questions you had from reading then you ask.

If it's obvious you haven't read the book why would they bother with you in the first place. Every professor I've ever had (at lest in STEM classes) is more than happy to help and explain to anyone so long as they actually put in effort.

If anything I'm glad your professor is attempting to weed out stupid pussies who are too entitled to read a fucking book (aka you).

Get the fuck out of here.

maybe in the first world sweetie

Why are college professor's even a thing these days? We could just replace then with bots and google.

Because it's good for society you fucking moron. Teaching, be it a professor or TA is one of the best ways of learning and understanding and solidifies their knowledge.
There needs to be a social aspect to peoples lives, learning from a person and interacting is an essential part of development.

At the end of the day you're a fool for not inherently understanding these facts and needing to ask the question in the first place. You fucking retard.

no you can't. you niggers need the whip.

>buys $200+ book
>doesn't read it

OP is a brainlet.

>Listing GPA on your resume like it matters
You did an internship, right? You've got work experience from the summers between semesters?

I have to get the internship first

Not even a normie but that's the exactly the attitude people hate from you and professors. Some people don't even know what they have to learn to learn or put it this way what they know that they know. Sometimes the analysis to get the solution of the question is not as straightforward that's why you're there to teach some basic thinking skills. I gave up talking to you losers and hit up the books and luckily was able to learn, but you guys are mostly useless

So if you figured it out from the book you had no business going to the professor or ta in the first place.
Goes to them for help is a last resort, read the book and figure your shit out.

Their job is to set a curriculum, projects and exams not to teach you the material.

You're not important you little shit. Just sink or swim no one cares.

We can [math]not[/math] spend hours a day on every single student teaching them the very basics of problem solving.

This is not what university is about or ever has been. Students have always learned primarily from textbooks and guided curricula. At a postgrad level from papers and extended conversations that are actually of interest to both parties.

As for you claiming you don't know hoe much you should learn that's bullshit and you know it. You have a syllabus for a reason. Fucking read it. If you have more time at the end of the semester study the extra chapters and materials. Again you are responsible for your own education.

As for developing creative problem solving skills, the only way pedagocical research has ever known to teach this is by letting students struggle on difficult problems.

If you're struggling on a problem for 4 weeks which takes me 4 minutes to solve it's because your problem solving skills are poor, not because you lack some requisite knowledge.

Asking me to solve it for you is the most pointless waste of an exercise I can imagine.

>I gave up talking to you losers and hit up the books and luckily was able to learn
Translation:
>I read the fucking book like I was supposed to and *SURPRISE* I learned the material and didn't have to waste anyone's time with stupid questions

Not all questions are stupid. But if the answer is literally in the prescribed textbook, it's a stupid question.

Oh and before the "hurr it's yer jerb" argument again. It's literally not. We are paid for a certain number of hours allocated to teaching and a certain number as a researcher etc.

Most of the lecturing working hours goes towards setting the syllabus, writing and marking exams/tests, writing notes, actual lecturing, tutorials etc.

Office consulting hours for students are usually from generosity not contract.

In this allocated time we need to help as many students as possible. We can't spend hours per semester on you individually because you failed at the practice problems and you're underperforming. There are plenty of students getting full marks and your lack of performance is your business.

What was the question?

Adapt and survive.

I still have loads of questions on why certain anlysis was done on some Dynamics problems for example but you know it's not just enough to read the book for me sometimes and the answers I get are nothing short of dark sarcasm. The book definitely gets you by though but as another user said the human interaction matters and let's be honest most professors give two shits when you ask questions because 'waste of my time' blah blah you should know this.

>Sometimes the analysis to get the solution of the question is not as straightforward that's why you're there to teach some basic thinking skills.
The "analysis" the TA is going to teach you always comes straight out of the book that you didn't read.

Professor teaching the class has forced the students to use a command line environment. It's a good thought but he didn't spend any class time talking about how to use it. I've already spent hours teaching like 30 students how to change directories or set environment variables. Most of them could barely even type.