University Professor Teaching

Back when I was in university I had a professor consistently show up 15 minutes late to our 1 hour lectures, read their online slides verbatim with no embellishment to enhance our understanding, and took a numerous amount of lectures off to go skiing. When confronted about it, I was told that people passing the class with high scores are the ones who don't even show up and studied straight out of the book on their own time.

In many cases the prof is doing the absolute minimum so they can focus on research. The lectures are often unoriginal (they are cribbed directly from the book). So someone sincerely interested in learning would be better off reading a few different textbooks or finding better lectures on the internet.

Wow, that's a somewhat strong way of putting it, but yes, I guess it would seem that way to a prof. hearing that (the original question from the student). And as an instructor on software topics myself (part-time), I guess I might think somewhat the same way, if that happened. Thankfully it rarely has happened with my students, the ones who actually join my courses, that is. There is of course the top of the funnel, in which there are many such people like the ones my uncle talked about.

It reminds me of teachers' and professors' attitude towards their classes/courses. From their point of view, it's maybe the only thing they teach or one of 2-3 things and it's the general topic they spend all their time on. From a student's perspective it's one of many courses in various topics. They can't be expected to laser focus on just the class that you teach. But many teachers don't get this concept. They think everything revolves around their

Sounds like its the fault of the professors/TAs for not using an appropriate analogy.

In my case, I had few lecturers, who went completely bonkers, when they read anonymous questionaires, with the fact, that lectures were some blank copy paste of lecturer's notes -> blackboard -> students' notebooks. They could not admit that. I believe next year those lecturers were changed, though damage to our and older generations were done (badly delivered studies).

I am friends with an unusually large number of professors, many of which are at very top institutions. The "make your own pedagogy" approach for students leaves huge portions of the classroom doing zero work whatsoever.

I've had a professor tell the class, in a relatively rare and small course:> I've been doing this so long that I can't remember which things are easy and hard to pick up for the first time, so you all will have to tell me— if you don't ask questions after each reading, I won't know what to reinforce and you will be lost.I think that's how it goes for classes that are not frequently taught or haven't been taught before, in almost any subject area.

As a former professor I used to have colleagues like this. My students would come in to my classes totally ignorant of basic material they needed to know. The missing material was in the course, but these colleagues would just not teach it because the students didn’t like it. The students all thought these professors were fantastic because they had such interesting lectures (only teach the fun stuff) and the work was so easy (give every one an A for being able to fog a mirror). That the students

You should be able to make that case to your prof. You would probably get points for it :)Some profs are subject matter experts who have no actual understanding of Pedagogy. So they pick up whatever rules someone else tells them to use, and then with time figure out what works and doesn't from feedback (which students are always very hesitant to give).