The other side of the coin (Score 2, Interesting)

I got my PhD at SmartyU, so I have taken a lot of classes and also TA'd one. At least to me, the subject matter was interesting (graduate/advanced undergrad artificial intelligence) and the professor was stellar. I had regular office hours, and was entirely open to meeting students at any other time convenient to them. The majority of my office hours (and the other TA's) were empty. Some people only came to argue test/homework grades. Office hours were only crowded immediately prior to the mid-term and final. My experience was not that students were hungry for knowledge and using every opportunity to learn from their TA's/professors. While it's easy to say how poor educators are doing, the student population at SmartyU didn't show overwhelming enthusiasm for learning (they did show a fair bit of enthusiasm for grades). My father was a professor, and he does like teaching - and his experience was much the same. Enthusiasm for grades, less enthusiasm for the actual learning. This isn't meant to sound high and mighty. I rarely went to office hours of classes I was taking either! I'm just trying to lend perspective that most educators do want to teach (whether they are good at it or not); but most of the time they become jaded when the first question is not "can you explain x" but "can you change this to an A?"