I'm currently in a sociology department. I may be speaking from my bum, but perhaps there's more money in history because you can also sell to more of a general readership. I'm not at a Research One institute, so they're not as hardcore about the prestige of publication (i.e., they want you to publish, but they don't make a big deal about first authorship, etc.).
A lot of my assistantship duties this past semester has been editing my supervisor's drafts for textbooks and journal publications.
True, what counts for tenure does vary a lot school by school. I was offered a job by one school where just ATTENDING conferences counted for the "scholarship" aspect of their tenure review. Of course, that means they were all about teaching.
...and related to that, why do we need a billion "Intro" level textbooks? They all say pretty much the same thing, and touch upon all of the major concepts and research in their respective fields. Every intro to psych book is pretty much going to say the same things about Freud, Piaget, Bandura, and Erickson. Really, we only need a couple intro books per discipline that are then updated with a new edition every couple of years when enough support has come out in the peer-reviewed literature for a group of findings that would warrant inclusion in a text-book.
I thoroughly agree. Of course, this is because it's a capitalist world and the various publishers are competing for market share.
My main problems with textbooks are a) the cost, b) the fact that they are useless once you finish the course, and c) since they try to provide big consensus overviews of the field, they usually run ten years or more behind current scholarship, which seems pretty counterproductive.
Go to say, though, I'm a little surprised at all the griping about not being able to sell used books for anything like the new price. Doesn't work for anything else - cars, basses, whatever - why should books be different?
Higher education is a scam in itself. Just like grade school, colleges still 'teach for the test'. That isn't learning.
I don't. There is no test in my classes. I grade on critical thought shown in essays and on class participation.
Well as a senior in 400 level classes who still takes multiple choice tests that are based on nothing more than definitions and simple black and white problem solving questions, I disagree. I basically got the same quality of education back in grade school; but at least in grade school my classes were made up of 30 or less students, which allowed for class discussion and quick, personal access to my instructor. I honestly feel like they teach kids just so they can make it into the next money pit - grad school.
To me, higher eduction in the US seems to be a scam meant to do no more than turn people into debt-ridden, mindless, and spineless drones. Sounds over dramatic, but the further I get into the system the more obvious it seems.
Man you got me started.
I am a senior in college and i have realized a few things about higher education. Its a joke.
College prepares you to take it, take it for the next 40 years. To get anything done in college you have to run to this person , to that person and then back to this person. They just pass the buck right along.
I have had the displeasure of going to Western Oregon University for criminal justice. Now i cannot believe some of the "Phd" education criminial justice professors. There some of the dumbest people I have met. One professor made our midterm with questions from a book never talked about , never assigned , heck we didnt know it existed. He decided bring a youtube video to class and I will give you a grade, are we 12? of course we got A's. The guy was a joke and did the same thing the last exam , we watched youtube the last 2 weeks of class. He would get hot all the time and let us go early, complete joke.
Another boring ass teacher made the tests hard , i never studied , never read the books or anything and i would get 65% on tests but then he included a extra credit page of common sense crap then would give 15-20% more credit so i had a B average on the test. Attendance also counted towards our grade so i just came everyday and doodled. I should have got at best a D and i got a B+ and never reading anything.
I have had classes i went to only 50% of the time and got A's.
Besides math i have never studied for a test, maybe a quick browse of notes , but study? nope . Flashcards? nope , nothing.
I can BS a 5-7 page paper in a hour.
College taught me to slack , BS and take the easy way out. It showed me most educated people are educated because they have rich parents and can screw around, not because there smart.
I have a 3.4 GPA, I would be a 4.0 student if i cared.
OK, now you guys have got ME started.
First off, sorry that you're learning from sucky profs. BUT...
You are paying for your education. You're not a kid who just needs to do what the grownups tell you. You are an adult pursuing your own goals, and paying (a lot) for the opportunity to pursue them.
What I see in both of these posts is a passive approach to your education. You EXPECT to show up for class, do as you're told, and somehow walk away with this amazing intellectual challenge. It doesn't work that way.
You need to take an active approach. For one thing, do some research when you're choosing your school and find out ahead of time which programs have active, dynamic, stimulating classes and which programs have a set of duds in the department. For another thing, if you're having experiences like this, you need to take the initiative to go to the faculty in your department and tell them that you feel like you're treading water and not getting real challenge, and ask them what you can do to dig deeper. Do a reading course, an independent study, undergrad research programs.
Most professors are as bored as you and are dying for the opportunity to do some great one-on-one mentoring with ambitious, motivated students. Most of them sit in office hours with the door open, reading a book by themselves, waiting for students to come for that close attention, and the students never show up. You can't pick one kid out of the lecture hall of 200 and make them become your disciple - they have to come to you and ask for it. The disciple chooses the mentor, not vice versa. Most students would rather sleep though lecture and then make these kinds of complaints than go to the faculty and say they're ready for the next level.
Most of the real learning college happens outside the classroom. That's why you only spend 12-18 hours per week in class whereas in high school you were at school more like 30-35 hours a week. You are SUPPOSED to be pursuing opportunities to learn independently.
Yes, you can always slack off and slide through college. But don't blame the college that you chose to slack off rather than do your best work. YOU are spending money to get the OPPORTUNITY to learn. Most students flush their tuition money down the toilet because they think the "grownups" are supposed to provide the motivation and challenge for them. Doesn't work that way - CAN'T work that way. It's like someone who buys a gym membership doesn't bother to put in their time on the machines, and then blames the personal trainers or the gym itself that they're spending all this money and not losing weight.
Part of this has to do with the American system where we run on student tuition rather than government funding. In America, it's considered a pretty harsh judgment to give a student a C, let alone fail them. They're paying tuition, after all, and you risk a lot of angry complaints from parents and negative course evaluations that endanger your tenure/promotion opportunities if you give hard assignments and are a tough grader. Even if you take the high road, you find that the students can't handle the hard assignments because nobody else is giving them and they don't know how to do it. So you take the path of least resistance and teach, not to the test, but to the lowest common denominator. Those pressures are less in a research I school rather than a more teaching-oriented school, but then in a research school you get rewarded for getting your publications out and teaching is just a distraction from your real work. That produces the kind of minimal-work-to-slide-through culture we have in our schools here, and professors all to often succumb to pressure to give the students what they want, which is easy passing for minimal work. The customer is always right, after all.
I recall speaking to a colleague from Australia who blithely mentioned that they routinely flunk half the students there, because they don't have that kind of pressure. I don't know if it makes for a better education in the final analysis, but should be food for thought. Would American students complain less about what a "scam" their education was if we went ahead and flunked half of them?
:scowl:
