Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 22, 1993 TAG: 9310280337
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
My real complaints, however, concern the bias and lack of understanding demonstrated by Walzer. First, the faculty he selected to support his contention that professors don't teach enough were about as representative of our profession as David Koresh is representative of ministers. Very few professors make over $100,000, and very few teach fewer than four courses per year, even in major state universities.
Particularly galling, however, was Walzer's promotion of common myths about professors' job responsibilities. Teaching is certainly our main duty, but we are also expected to serve on college committees, do service in the community, advise students, work individually with students on research and independent study, and engage in professional development.
Further, one cannot gauge the amount of time a professor spends on teaching by counting his or her hours in the classroom. Particularly when one is developing a course, it is easy to spend three hours outside of class in preparation for every hour in class. Even when one has taught a course several times, the reduction in time for lecture preparation is offset by an increase in time spent on developing new assignments and demonstrations. Walzer,
however, equates number of courses taught with a school's dedication to the teaching profession, as if the more courses one teaches, the better one's teaching will be.
Part of the myth about professors' work time may come from the impression that knowledge consists of a collection of facts, and that by the time one has a Ph.D., one has memorized all of the facts in one's discipline. It is then an easy task to walk into class and dispense them.
Nothing could be further from the truth. First, the "facts" in most disciplines are constantly being revised and added to. Second, what we learn is how to gather, organize, analyze and explain "facts," and there are always new possibilities available. We work constantly to reorganize our lectures and to communicate our ideas more clearly. Third, professors' graduate training makes them experts in narrowly defined subfields of their discipline, so they often must learn new material to teach their courses. In all, this makes teaching more of a learning experience than one would expect.
MARY CAMAC, Ph.D.
Assistant professor of psychology
Roanoke College
SALEM
by CNB