As the University of Florida steadily ascends the metaphorical, but all important college ranking charts I think I am beginning to notice a difference, and improvement in faculty.
Take yesterday for example, in my Marketing Research class we are doing a data analysis of some surveys we created, and in explaining our assignment, our prof is only making us present a powerpoint presentation. No paper. Of course I'm thrilled about this because I hate writing papers, but more importantly he validated his reasoning by admitting that in the real world (something many classes easily forget about) you will never be asked to write a 10 page paper about the inferences from marketing research for the execs to see. You will be creating a quick, concise powerpoint presentation that gets your point across in an easy visual manner. I don't feel like many other of my professors in the past have this line of reasoning. Need I remind them that the reason people go to college is to get prepared to get a real job in the real world. Don't make us do silly assignments. Help prepare me for the future.
A second example, that just happened to be the very same day was in my Advertising class. He announced that he would be giving the rest of the quizzes online. His reasoning was that he was tired of people just showing up to take the quiz (its a pretty large lecture hall) and leaving, so if he just gave them online, the people that really wanted to learn would only show up. I thought this was one of the smartest things a professor could ever say. Honestly, in college a professor doesn't care if you pass or fail, you are on your own. So why crowd the learning space with a bunch of kids that don't care, chat incessently, and create overall distraction to the others who enjoy the class?
So what did we learn?
1) Make school and assignments real world oriented, helping to actually train me for future endeavors.
2) There will always be those that care, and those that don't care. Make it as productive and enjoyable as possible to those who care.
Now why did it take 4 years for my professors to learn this?
02:00 PM on 11.20.04
That's why I'm SO glad I went to Colubmus State Community College..if they weren't teaching us stuff about the real jobs and teating us like we are selling our product to the class like they were a client, I wouldn't be going there..Some of the teachers here at CSCC haven't taken teaching classes, they were hired because they've been in the industry for years, so they shape the classes around what they know..and the liberal arts classes I've taken luckily had teachers that teach concepts and not just facts..
I'm glad that some of your teachers are teaching differently (better) than what I've heard about most University teachers..that rocks!