At 12:44 AM -0500 11/24/03, geoff carver wrote:
>i dunno - it should be good - if only the profs who are supposed to
>teach it knew what they were talking about, maybe that would help...?

Amen, Brother Carver! Look back on your own educational odyssey. Were
the subjects boring? Or were the teachers incompetent?

Name any subject, and you'll find people who think it's boring. A
similar number will think it's really neat.  Why?

Well, I hated trigonometry. I struggled through three trig courses
(two remedial) and still didn't get it. Then I was fortunate enough
to work with an old surveyor with a ninth-grade education who made
math come alive for me. He loved the subject, and ever since I have
been fascinated with geometry and trigonometry.

It's all in the teacher. Any subject can be interesting if the
teacher is worth his or her salary. Unfortunately, academia is not
exclusively peopled with interesting people.

A student's course schedule is sort of academic russian roulette.
Unfortunately, the bullets too frequently are distributed by academic
bureaucrats with little or no reference to the needs of students.

Get some boring old place-holder with tenure, and the results will be
inevitable. Get a grad-assistant kid who just half-learned the
subject last semester, and you can't expect positive results. Get the
course nobody wants to teach, and guess who is the chosen instructor.

Blame for student boredom in any subject lies entirely with the teaching of it.
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For any awkward moment, in any conversation,
there is always an appropriate, or insanely
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