Before we get into this, I'd like to say one thing: I like teachers in general. They introduce me to new knowledge, and I'm friends with a few although, oddly enough, they're either English teachers or crossdressing mathematicians... but they still count.

That doesn't mean they're perfect and something happened earlier today which touched off this rant. In Analysis and Control of Linear Systems (ACLS, pronounced "ackles"), our professor went over the pop quiz we had on Friday. Now, some background is necessary: this pop quiz came up at the end of class five minutes before we had time to leave. It concerned pendulum systems, which were only glossed over in our previous courses and thusly sucked. With little knowledge on the subject and less time to apply it in, I wouldn't be assuming too much if I said the entire class took it on the jaw. Nevertheless, today we covered it again to make sure everyone was on the same page. Throughout the explanation, our nice (but new) doctorate teacher kept saying how it only took him five minutes, eight minutes to do this problem even while explaining it (remember, we only had five minutes and it took him eight).

When he was done, someone in the front row pointed out that how he finished the solution made it an inequality; units of torque on one side and units of force in the other. Our professor forgot to multiply terms out by the distance they were acting in order for it to be the "right" answer. He put some squares in the right spots (but forgot some more coefficients concerning those lengths) and declared the amended, "correct" version just as correct as the incorrect version previous to it and said: "How easy is this?"

To which I immediately replied: "Easy enough that it only took you eight minutes to get it wrong."

...

I wasn't actually trying to be a smartass. I was trying to (ungently, admittedly) make a point: there is such a thing called The Ratio--if it takes a doctorate five minutes to do a problem in his field, generally it takes students fifteen minutes to do it simply because they are not as familiar with the source material. They can't match the doctor in problem-solving speed simply because the doctor has more experience. Our good ACLS professor still has to learn this, and I'm sure he will... unfortunately, I get the feeling that he'll learn it the hard way, and by "hard way" I mean "the way that is hard on us." Ah well, such is life, live and learn and all that.

Teachers have a particular mission: get knowledge into people's heads. This can be rather tricky when the people involved are uninterested or just wastes of perfectly good complex organic compounds. However, there's no need for the teacher to make the situation worse by... complicating things. By complicating I don't mean being hard or being tough; it's quite a bit more holistic than that. The best way to explain is via examples:

The bloke to the right with the goofy smile is Doctor John George, Professor Emeritus of Aerospace Engineering. He is a god amongst men, when teaching is concerned. His degree hails from 1955 and the textbook he teaches orbital mechanics from was published during the glory days in 1971. To call the man "ancient" could quite possibly be a horrible understatement, as much as a high-progress field as aerospace engineering and science is. This man has seen, and been in a position to fully understand, the entire Space Race, the evolution of corporate interest in space, and is right now following the expansion of private interests into space flight with relish.

That's right, following. He may be ancient, but he's also more up to date than I am. It's his job, and he understands that... and now I'm digressing a bit much.

His classes are HARD. Even with open-book and open-notes exams, he makes sure that you are there from the beginning of the class period to the end demonstrating that you know what he's been actively teaching throughout the semester. He is an absolute hawk when it comes to procedure; one of the most important things in doing astrodynamics is to ensure what quadrant one is operating in because calculators only return principle values of trigonometric functions. To all of you who aren't math inclined, that means that if one punches an equation into a calculator, one has about a 50-50 chance of putting down the right answer if they just follow what the calculator tells them. This is why Dr. George is absolutely adamant about people doing quadrant checks and he will absolutely annihilate anyone who tries to do such things in their head.

I was about to type "mercilessly annihilate," but I realized that would be most inaccurate. Dr. George is a good teacher because, partially because he is so challenging (one absolutely has to learn the material), but mostly because he's absolutely dedicated. Students are encouraged (almost demanded) to ask him questions if they don't understand something, and he's one of the most approachable guys in the universe--he has a tendency to offer beer to students from the minifridge in his office if they stop by to check up on some things. He offers his home phone number so students can call him; he gladly takes class time to take questions concerning homework and actually arranges his homework assignments so people can take advantage of this. He teaches what he loves and he obviously loves to teach--and that's the important thing. Even in the appropriately superior-subordinate relationship of teacher to student, he seems to come at it from an even mindset (some would say "humble," but the word's got too much connotation): he's just a guy who just happens to know more about something and is talking to other guys. No more, no less. He's tough and he knows he is, but because he comes at it with a sense of humanity ("This is why I'm tough on you guys") and what some would call humility (he often resorts to self-deprecating humor with a crooked toothy grin) no one can hold it against him.

The other side of the coin on the other side of the page is Doctor David Manor, currently holding the status of Recently Fired Fucknut at the University. I'll admit that I don't like him, but that's not much of a stretch: no one--faculty, staff, or student--at the University actually did save a few small bands of cultists here and there. If there could ever be a diametric opposite to Dr. George, it's this guy. An elitist of the highest caliber who would openly say (so often that it failed to be joking) that nothing was ever his fault, he told stories about how he was a helicopter special forces test pilot blackbelt Kabbalah lover theologian philosopher in his early days instead of teaching us what we were paying good money to learn.

Oi, the stories. This is a guy who is proud that he managed to convince his second son to "take matters into his own hands" and commit suicide when he contracted AIDS and was slowly turning into a basket case.

Yeah, I didn't believe it either before he told us in class. I can understand the mindset of wanting to go out on one's own terms, but that's a personal choice that you never suggest to anyone else.

I don't know about you, but people generally don't pay money to go to university and hear creepy stuff like that instead of getting the learning they're paying for. Generally he would waste class either telling stories or simply writing equations on the board with little to no explanation because all learning would come from the homework, quizzes, and exams. His teaching method essentially consisted of throwing the entire textbook at the class and telling them to do it. Literally. Summarize every chapter, do every single problem. He would occasionally think of other random projects and assign them as well, and of course all of it was absolutely manditory for passing--no taking a pass on one or two assignments so one has time to do three others. Finally, after all that, he would set us up to fail by putting questions on quizzes, tests, and final exams covering material we had never seen before.

Why? Partially because everything is a "learning experience." Partially to try and wash us out of the engineering program. Mostly so we would understand the feeling of failure, because we would get to know it well.

I'm not making any of this up: all those were his openly stated goals.

To an extent, some of the reasoning behind his methods were valid: assign a lot of work so people are forced to work in groups; force people to get a lot of practice. He actually did expose us to a lot of important material... unfortunately, due to his methods, very little stuck and practically none of it looked important. When everything becomes vital knowledge--even random things he says about the 22 grams that people are supposed to lose when they die while the class is walking out the door--then nothing becomes vital knowledge. The only service he rendered was to vaguely introduce concepts that would be made sense of later.

Even all that would have been more acceptable if, in the end, he had been decent about it... but the man had no soul when it came to teaching. He had a doctorate, we didn't; he was published, we weren't; he was our superior, we were nothing. He was not available for any useful help when we asked, nor was he even particularly concerned about living to his own standards of perfection. We had to use spell and grammar check on every single assignment, which really isn't asking much. We get to our final exam in both "Introduction to Aeronautics and Astrodynamics" and "Aircraft Performance" and see the question:

Q: The plane flies at sixty degrees. T F

What the hell. Sixty degrees what? Sixty degrees angle of bank? Angle of attack? Sixty degrees inclination relative to the ground? What kind of plane? True or false. It is an unanswerable question.

And we never got our "learning experience" from it because we never got our final exams back to see whether it was supposed to be true or false. What pointlessness.

 

I've got more to say about Manor, but that's a rant for later. Hopefully the above examples help to demonstrate what it means when I say one person is a good teacher while the other is not. A good teacher just has to get the material across fairly, and most manage to do it. That's it.

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