Survey Finds 40% Of Colleges Have ZERO GOP Professors

[masterpanthera_t]

Teaching high school students is obviously different than teaching early college students and even more different than teaching advanced college students. Even though we call them all "teachers" the roles become different as the level of subject expertise changes and the knowledge of the student changes. In high school, students are being exposed to subjects that they many not be familiar with and/or possess a cursory understanding only. Part of the goal there is to inspire and show them the potential for those disciplines in the real world and also to provide them a chance to learn how to think (at the early stages of this type of thinking). As you get into college, the professor's goal is to teach some specific skills that show how the discipline is applied in the real world (to work more on intermediate stages of learning how to think) and teach some specific stuff. I'm basing this on STEM classes in College. It might be slightly different in other "liberal arts" courses, but overall I think the concept of refining how students learn to think still applies here. As you get further along (say third year or later in College), the courses build on specializing in different aspects of the discipline (again, in my experience in a STEM field), and to build on initial level knowledge about the applications of your discipline. At this point, you're professor's role is really not one of inspiring the student for the most part, but to take them into deeper understanding close to a beginning level professional's understanding. Still, there is no guarantee that everything you learned up to this point will end up being used thoroughly in your profession because there's a lot of different "specialties" within the employment. Again, your professor's job is to show a range of possibilities, to help the student decide where to proceed based on the student's aptitude.

Now at the advanced levels (graduate and up), the professor's goal is to allow the student to specialize to the point that the student can pioneer some new work on their own. Especially at the level of doctorate students. The professor is more of a guide here, and essentially the student is learning on their own.

Coming back to the original point, the professors in college (at least in STEM fields) are only expected to teach enough at the undergrad level so that the student can then be prepared to learn as much as they can in their eventual employment. The prof is not expected to know all the nuances, nooks and crannies or whatever you will, about day to day activities of the job. I imagine a lot of this will translate to the other fields as well, but especially so for STEM fields. Maybe there's a small exception to those students in Medical School as many of their training at that level is meant to directly translate over to their work, but I'm not sure.