Without a sports jacket and dress pants professors look trashy and can’t be taken seriously. Students want their professors to dress up every day, otherwise they don’t believe the professor should be there. Students also want their professors to be passionate about the subject they teach because if the professor doesn’t care about the subject and doesn’t want to be there, then the students definitely won’t want to be there either. Despite what others think about the personality and fashion of professors, there are other ways to think about it. When I have a class and the professor is passionate about the subject, the class basically passes itself.
Mark Edmundson’s “on the uses of a liberal education” displays how corrupt the current education system is. He raises problems of consumerism in colleges and also indicates that college’s students lack intellectual curiosity. The multiple choices student have today in college have made the college a facile learning environment, resulting in complacent students. He ridicules the fact that students can withdraw from classes with a one month left in semester. In the beginning of the text, Edmundson depicts a classroom he particularly doesn’t enjoy on evaluation day.
In lee Bollinger speech he accused Ahmadinejad of being petty and cruel and criticized his dictatorship as a president. In Ahmadinejad’s speech he mentioned that he was invited by Lee Bollinger to address students in an academic atmosphere, which made it even more preposterous for lee Bollinger introduction being watched by his peers. Lee Bollinger allowed his emotions and personal feelings to overpower his speech. In a speech/introduction it should not be merely all opinionated. He should be somewhat of an educated man to have accomplished being a lawyer, the 19th president of Columbia University, an IV lead University.
Instead of worrying about the pay off the students should be concerned with developing all they can intellectually. The author then expresses their feelings towards multi-year contracts. They tell how tenure plans which would be more beneficial. They believe that professors have no motive to improve their skills when rewarded with tenure plans, for themselves or their students. Another thing mentioned in the article that people who come to teach in a college that are not actually considered teachers.
Therefore, the university loses credibility. The writer goes on to say she is not against being involved with commercial activities, she thinks it’s good to be connected to the outside world but she thinks there must be a limit in order to maintain the university’s image and freedom to make their own decisions. In this essay Croissant’s intention is to make students and faculty members aware of the wider context of what’s going on around them. It seeks to open their eyes and realize how harmful it can be to sign contracts with corporations or accept money from them. I, as a student found this article very convincing and helpful.
Gerald Graff points out the pressure that society and school put on students to be academically intelligent. Students must have the perfect grades and attend the highest ranking school. Students also have to go to extreme measures to just get through one class because they know that failing is not a option. As Graff says, “To say that students need to see their interests “through academic eyes” is to say that street smarts are not enough” (p.303). I agree with what Graff says and also agree when he says, “The challenge, as a college professor Ned Laff has put it, “is not simply to exploit students’ nonacademic interests, but to get them to see those interests through academic eyes” (p.302).
In Patrick O’Malley’s essay “More Testing, More Learning”, he claims that the only way to improve students’ learning is frequently test. Malley knows that many college professors only use midterms and finals to judging students abilities. As a result, many students feel stressful about the test, and they fail the test. So Malley proposes that professors need to give more frequent brief exams. In this way, students would learn more efficiently, study more regularly, and have less anxiety.
With reference to this, if students shy away from attaining greater dreams and goals and argue that they are not bright enough, then that is only an excuse. As the president of the university declares, there is no such thing as smartness; it is simply how much people try to get what they need and desire since lethargy and the thought that someone is smart will not take them anywhere (TED, 2013). The four pillars of success, he confirmed, were forming community amongst the students, high expectations, using researchers to create researchers and educational faculty getting concerned with their students’ affairs (TED, 2013). The high expectations create a feeling of curiosity
They stress day and night over these overrated tests, like previously stated channeling out the imagination, curiosity and good will. Besides being an imprecise measure for students, they use them to judge a teacher’s performance as well, essentially used to either reward or punish them. Standardized test are not helping us very much right now. In conclusion, the usage of standardized tests should be discontinued or by the very least lessened. These tests are not helping people, it’s initially having a negative effect on students and teachers.
Shirky immediately establishes his credibility with The Washington Post readers by acknowledging his occupation as a professor in the field of social media. With this statement, he also diffuses any counter-arguments directed towards his insight and familiarity with modern technology. Furthermore, Shirky asserts that multi-tasking is a negative consequence of allowing laptops, tablets and phones to be used in class. He elaborates on the negative effects of multi-tasking by stating, “We’ve known for some time that multi-tasking is bad for the quality of cognitive work, and is especially punishing of the kind of cognitive work we ask of college students” (Strauss 4). To substantiate his position against the unproductive nature of multi-tasking, Shirky qualifies his statements with research from a Standford University study.