Comment Re:Instructors DO work for their students (Score 1) 1260
I'm going to assume that you plan to teach at a public school. I posit that in that situation you do not serve the students. Your job exists not because the students want you to teach, but because the parents and taxpayers want you to teach, and *they* pay your salary.
Democratic society, as a whole, recognizes the need for an educated populace in order to advance the general welfare of society. The community, whether through the taxing district that collects property or sales taxes directly for the school district budget or the larger state that funds each district per capita, is the employer and the one to whom the teacher is beholden. I claim that that that community expects you to educate all of the students in the curriculum that the school, district, or state has set forth. Were one student, or all of the students, to challenge your authority in the classroom, the community expects you to impose a degree of martial law to maintain order, with reinforcements if necessary. That such conflict happens is an indictment of the parenting (or lack of same) that "prepared" the child for school.
The university classroom is analogous. The numbers show that that the students do not pay the professor's salary. The community (government grants, private donations, etc.) pay the vast bulk of faculty payroll. The university and its faculty is there to serve the community by advancing knowledge (research) and propogating it (through teaching and colloquia). In professional disciplines (medicine, law, engineering, etc.) society expects the university in general, and the teacher in particular, to prepare qualified candidates for employment. In academic disciplines, the payoff for society is less economically direct, but the expectation is similar: create knowledge and spread it around.
You, as a nascent teacher, know (or soon will know) that the institutional method of conveying knowledge is based on a factory model, and that order in the classroom is critical. I do not claim that this is the only or the best way for students to learn. Indeed, a mentor in my childhood, my high school principal, told me privately that true students learn in spite of "education," not because of it. But the factory pedagogical model is the one we use, by and large, with all of its shortcomings. A teacher instructs the students. If one or all of the students are so disrespectful as to interfere with the orderly conduct of the class, those students by needs *must* be removed.
I concede that some teachers are incompetent. If such incompetence creates an inordinate amount of classroom conflict, that will soon (we hope) become apparent to the administration and the teacher will be "reassigned," though probably not in time for the students unfortunate enough to expose the teacher's defects.
I applaud MustardMan's candor and courage. I've seen too many brats on my university campus to doubt the circumstances he described or challenge the propriety of his actions.
Democratic society, as a whole, recognizes the need for an educated populace in order to advance the general welfare of society. The community, whether through the taxing district that collects property or sales taxes directly for the school district budget or the larger state that funds each district per capita, is the employer and the one to whom the teacher is beholden. I claim that that that community expects you to educate all of the students in the curriculum that the school, district, or state has set forth. Were one student, or all of the students, to challenge your authority in the classroom, the community expects you to impose a degree of martial law to maintain order, with reinforcements if necessary. That such conflict happens is an indictment of the parenting (or lack of same) that "prepared" the child for school.
The university classroom is analogous. The numbers show that that the students do not pay the professor's salary. The community (government grants, private donations, etc.) pay the vast bulk of faculty payroll. The university and its faculty is there to serve the community by advancing knowledge (research) and propogating it (through teaching and colloquia). In professional disciplines (medicine, law, engineering, etc.) society expects the university in general, and the teacher in particular, to prepare qualified candidates for employment. In academic disciplines, the payoff for society is less economically direct, but the expectation is similar: create knowledge and spread it around.
You, as a nascent teacher, know (or soon will know) that the institutional method of conveying knowledge is based on a factory model, and that order in the classroom is critical. I do not claim that this is the only or the best way for students to learn. Indeed, a mentor in my childhood, my high school principal, told me privately that true students learn in spite of "education," not because of it. But the factory pedagogical model is the one we use, by and large, with all of its shortcomings. A teacher instructs the students. If one or all of the students are so disrespectful as to interfere with the orderly conduct of the class, those students by needs *must* be removed.
I concede that some teachers are incompetent. If such incompetence creates an inordinate amount of classroom conflict, that will soon (we hope) become apparent to the administration and the teacher will be "reassigned," though probably not in time for the students unfortunate enough to expose the teacher's defects.
I applaud MustardMan's candor and courage. I've seen too many brats on my university campus to doubt the circumstances he described or challenge the propriety of his actions.
