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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (90930)	12/16/2004 11:16:00 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793809

Excellent column on this subject, and it brings up another "hobby horse" of mine. The poor quality of teaching at our Colleges. I will just post a couple of concluding paragraphs, and the URL. Why Colleges Think They're Better Than AP By Jay Mathews Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, December 14, 2004; 12:27 PM .... Casement notes that, according to the College Board, only six percent of AP teachers have doctorates and only about half hold master's degrees "in an academic discipline . . . consistent with the AP course that they teach." He asks: "At what colleges would a faculty profile like this be considered acceptable -- roughly half of the faculty lacking in master's degree in what they teach?" This sentence awakened sour memories. It was very early in my life as an undergraduate that I learned about the great gap between academic credentials and teaching ability. My introductory college courses were sleep-inducing lectures in large halls with hundreds of students who had little access to their professors and tried, but failed, to get useful insights from the teaching assistants we saw once a week. My sons and their friends attended similarly large private and public universities, and had the same complaint. The message to college freshmen was and is: absorbing this stuff is your job, not ours. This approach encourages memorization and regurgitating the textbook on exams, but you are paying $40,000 a year for it, so you figure it must be good. And the colleges have made sure there is no higher ed version of an independently graded AP or IB test to prove otherwise. Now let us look into the AP and IB courses. There are usually no more than 20 to 25 students per teacher, and three to four hours of class a week. Students have many opportunities to ask questions, float theories, debate important points and get regular feedback -- rather than the standard college midterm and final -- on how they are doing. There are some bad AP and IB teachers out there, just as there are bad college instructors, but in my experience, good AP and IB courses are more common than good introductory college courses. AP teachers like Eric Rothschild in Scarsdale, N.Y., or David Keener in Alexandria, or Jaime Escalante in East Los Angeles, Calif., have used simulations and humor and visual aids and knowledge of each student to make those classes work, not something you usually find in big university lecture halls. College professors are terrific at advising graduate students on their research, but what we are talking about is teaching introductory calculus, or biology or economics to teenagers, which takes patience, clarity and attention to individual student needs. The last time I checked, those were not qualities that universities looked for when handing out PhDs. washingtonpost.com