Corresponds with my opinion: The curricula are crap and many educators at best mediocre in the topic. No wonder the "smart kids" are frustrated.
P.S. I remember hitting calculus in college and drawing the "hard" professor. ("Oooh", people exclaimed sympathetically.) I pulled an A+ and enjoyed the course, because the professor knew and cared about what he was teaching. He just insisted that you did, too.
P.S. I remember hitting calculus in college and drawing the "hard" professor. ("Oooh", people exclaimed sympathetically.) I pulled an A+ and enjoyed the course, because the professor knew and cared about what he was teaching. He just insisted that you did, too.
That's usually what it means to be the 'hard' prof. I had a couple of those in CS and I took every class they offered. Most students would drop their classes so that always left me and just a couple others to have nearly a private class with a great professor.
In good conscience I must make a distinction: my public school complaints were the direct result of regressive policies on part of administration. Many of my actual teachers did the best they could with ridiculous constraints.
In college, though, it's often times the professors who create the problems.
Fair enough. In college, my Calculus II course, taught by a different professor, was terrible. To the credit of the department and administration, they did not keep her around (I forget her formal title, but she was essentially on trial).
I had some good, dedicated and effective high school teachers (although they were perhaps the minority). Unfortunately, as I recall and/or experienced it, the math department was not particularly strong.
Real analysis was the hardest class I ever took, and I didn't even really have to. Barely scraped a C, but I wear it more proudly than most of the A's I've ever gotten.
We use the Moore Method at UT. We started with a series of axioms and over the duration of the semester we built and proved ourselves as a group every theory. And only those theories successfully proven by the group were admissible on tests. It was rad as hell.
Different contexts, but that reminds me of a sort of "second class, taken after introductory programming" survey class of the CS domain, taught by another rather intense professor. I learned more in those 12 or so weeks than in most other classes. It was intense, but left one with a rather good, basic survey -- which is no mean feat, given the breadth of the domain (from boolean logic and gates up through higher level languages, discreet mathematics, statistics and O notation, etc.)
People who thought they were getting a typical "survey" class -- LOL! This professor wasn't having any of it.
Perhaps a bit unfair, if you were trying to balance an overall course load that was already heavy. But of itself, worth it.
"The curricula are crap and many educators at best mediocre in the topic."
Good point also. My High School math department consisted mostly of a temp with an education in English Lit, a basketball coach who had to fill a teaching position in order to be allowed to coach, a professional motocross rider who taught part-time and gave out a sheet of formula every test and an obviously insane man who randomly selected a student every week to sit out in the hallway for no reason.
P.S. I remember hitting calculus in college and drawing the "hard" professor. ("Oooh", people exclaimed sympathetically.) I pulled an A+ and enjoyed the course, because the professor knew and cared about what he was teaching. He just insisted that you did, too.