Professor makes his mark, but it costs him his job

reply to post by logician magician


well now you dont understand my position at all

the reason i am not trying is because what they teach is total BS

there is nothing mentally stimulating me from university and thats why i have no motivation to try

maybe if they started teaching me how to think, instead of how to be a good little slave worker,

i know the type you are talking about though, the ones who do nothing but party, just get by on university and never commit themselves to anything

i know many people like this,

but im not one of them, i commit myself to other areas of learning that arent meant for slave populations

i have to find ways to stimulate my mind in other areas, to excel myself in other fields from the norm

its mainly because i refuse to be like everyone else

once they start teaching real stuff, ill start applying myself to learning

Wasted his on career on something like this?

Dumb in my opinion, and you know who's dumber? Those students who can't get above a B in the current school system.

Students too lazy, lower the standards, IQ drops another couple of points.

I agree with him grades are rubbish.

The most successful people financially have manipulated their way to the top, by means of deceit, networking with others that deceive.

How many people actually cheat in schools for better grades?

How many people actually use the rubbish they learned in school?

My University Degree is next to worthless, I learned most of my worldly skills after leaving school and working everyday.

I think vocational schools are great because they are hands on and actually teach something worthwhile, while university's are mainly just people that went from graduate school to teaching others in the university. They have almost no sense of reality, kind of like full time politicians living in a bubble.

Coming from a teacher who has worked in private industry for 10 years and teached for 14 years, this professor is pushing a bag of total nonsense. Ranking students by grades shows competency in what they are learning. ...So having a kid that is un-motivated, doesn't study for tests or is disruptive in class should get the same grade? Please, don't make me laugh! If you want the United States to become a 3rd world country this professor's view is your fast track on getting there.

Even without implementing this professor's views, this country is already in for a downward spiral. The majority of today's "me generation" is lazy,
un-motivated and doesn't understand the importance of getting a good education. And please, don't blame the teachers or the educational system. I use technology in my classroom on a daily basis and utilize fun ways to learn and motivate kids, but I still have a lot of kids that are just plain lazy and don't want to do the work. It all starts at home and how you raise your kids. This statement is very true in education..."You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink". In other words, you can educate a teacher in new, fun, and motivating ways to teach, but if a kid is just too lazy and doesn't value learning it's money spent for nothing.

Ok, the professor was teaching a 4th year physics class, or I assume that would translate to a 4000 level course for most US universities. While giving everyone an A is nice, I guarantee you a good chunk of those in the class will be going on to attend some grad school. I don't know about most, but if I was told on the first day of class I was getting an A, I wouldn't have bothered to show up for the rest of the year and turned in my book. Even the students who did go to class didn't put in near the time they would have if they were trying to get a grade. It would be one thing to go, SURPRISE! you're all getting A's after everyone took your final even, but I feel he did a disservice to many.

I agree with the professor. What I think a lot of the people in this thread don't understand is that this is a high level science course that Professor Rancourt is teaching. This has less to do with grades, which will be very competitive regardless of what grade they expect to receive, than with the attitude or philosophy of his students. He wants them to be more like scientists, meaning he wants them to have an actual thirst for knowledge and learning rather just memorizing their textbooks.

And remember, even if he does give everyone an A+ that doesn't mean he will give everyone a decent letter of recommendation to graduate programs. It also seems that he is advising them about their theses and therefore totally aware of what effort they are putting into their education.

I really think what is key is that this isn't a 100 or 200 level course, and is mostly full of students who are majoring in this subject...so the attitude with which they approach learning is already different from how a student in a lower level course would...

reply to post by logician magician


Except basic math is precise and google can only provide opinion most of the time.

You say a calculator is like cheating. I see it differently.

In the first 12 grades, you could either spend time learning more basic math, or use a calculator, skip tedious work, and then move on to more advanced math sooner where a calculator can not help you.

My only beefs with calculators is that teachers nowadays do not care much at all about teaching kids long division, which hurts when dealing with variables.

reply to post by misterglad


The only flaw with your logic is that it is that it is far from reality in how things actually work.

Teaching kids to be scientists? Good idea.
Giving all the kids an A in a system where 99.99% of people have to work for their GPA so places are more likely to higher them? Unfair.

His teaching habits are flawed. This teacher could have spent the year teaching them how to be productive thinkers and then do a test on that, however the setup be I do not know, but that is his job.

Originally posted by FritosBBQTwist
reply to post by misterglad

 

The only flaw with your logic is that it is that it is far from reality in how things actually work.

Teaching kids to be scientists? Good idea.
Giving all the kids an A in a system where 99.99% of people have to work for their GPA so places are more likely to higher them? Unfair.

His teaching habits are flawed. This teacher could have spent the year teaching them how to be productive thinkers and then do a test on that, however the setup be I do not know, but that is his job.

No one ever said he didn't do that. Perhaps he taught them a marvelous education, they all seemed like they were more capable than the average kids who get A's and B's, so he just decided to grade them on their abilities and skills not a piece of paper.

The bad thing about schools is that they treat us like computers and they want us to be like computers. They make us remember almost everything. It's a matter of who has the best memory. That encourages many students to just try to remember the information by reading everything in one night. You don't have to know everything, you just have to get an A.

If you get an A in an exam it doesn't always mean that you are smart. It means that you got most of the answers right, but it doesn't matter how.
If you are a good cheater and have smart friends then you can graduate in a good college. That's because you don't have to show that you are smart, you only need to get A's.

The government also needs to spend more money on the schools. Why do they spend billions of dollars in one single Stealth Bomber instead of using it to build better schools? Why not use the billion dollars to give a school better technology to make the students learn much better.

Even the teachers are underpaid. A football player gets paid a lot more than a teacher, but which job is more important?

This is one is another reason why we need change.

The teacher is trying to send out a message. An important message that most people don't understand.

I'm sorry if I was a little off topic.

I agree with the teacher.

I was in university once upon a time, in Law. It was the most mindless, pointless, long winded, badly documented, badly exposed, indoctrinational experience of my whole educational life. I hated it with a passion. I tried to do well for my parent's sake, but I just couldn't fit. Square peg, round hole sort of thing.

Looking back I understand why now, the system is against my very ethos. I learned a lot back then, but not what they wanted me to learn. They wanted me to be a well packaged repeater, to be absorbed back into the society system, to fit on my shelf and earn my trinkets and, above all, to not deviate from the boundries. To not progress, either personally, either materially (as more and more university graduates are finding themselves lower middle class and even unemployed) and, possibly above all, spiritually. I was to remain trapped in my left brain, repeating bits and pieces of "knowledge", much the same way a parrot does, although with a bit more sophistication and a few less ruffled feathers.

It didn't take. Something inside of me is just to strong for the system to break, I just can't keep myself from seeking truth, despite what people want to sell me as truth, I always go for my own interpretation. It's not even that I'm a free thinker, I'm atracted to truth like a moth to a flame and my whole intelectual, and even emotional, processes come down to finding out what is true. Sometimes at great personal cost, as I have lost friendships and jobs. But, somehow, in the long run it always seems to work out in my favour, the universe seems to compensate.

There is life beyond "superior" education. And sure as heck there is knowledge. Our current westernised educational system is corrupt and needs a major overhaul. As it is it wastes time, it wastes resources, it stifles progress (real social progress, not the concrete variety) and it ruins lives (even of people who see themselves as "having it made" have a ruined life, it's just that they don't see the alternative). It's a trap. There is more knowledged to be gained on a road trip than in a whole semester at college imho.

wonderful....someone with a degree of higher learning is being canned for teaching student how to think for themselves.....i mean gees....i mean how can being able to formulate your own thoughts and beliefs be such an awful thing? well i guess, maybe that IS a big thing against TPB. i hope he appeals this stupidity.....people goto colleges and universities to learn not to be trained......there's a big difference between learning and training....a monkey can be trained to do a task but a human can learn...which allows for further refining of how to tackle a certain situation.

I think this teacher has watched the bar scene in Good Will Hunting too many damn times.

Leave philosophy for the philoshy majors.

Plus enough with the word "regurgitating", it's played out, and annoying. It doesn't make you sound smart because really, in allo actuality, he only heard it from someone else, or read it somewhere.

How else are we supposed to learn?

Until we can produce levels of genuise, display by some autistic people, who can still fit in perfectly with society, and take care of thier everyday life on demand, we can't just say throw away the learning material, and go experience life. Sheesh, it's like the 60's all over again, I hated it the first time and I wasn't even alive for it.

Some people need grades and degrees as proof that they are intelligent.

College is not to find intelligent or creative people, it is to find the most effective and obedient sheep/zombies/robots.

If you are smart enough, you won't need a piece of paper to prove it to others.

reply to post by The All Seeing I

I disagree completely with his policy. It's not about reading the professors mind, its about knowing your #. I have friends in engineering at my school, they get tested constantly, and they have to EARN their As. They all study their asses off, and understand the material inside and out. They don't just know how to the do problems, they can apply the knowledge to any situation. THAT is how you should get As. Making students work without any grades is pointless. If you aren't smart enough to ace the test, you didnt study enough and you don't deserve to get an A+.

The best news - is that he he followed what he believed was right.
He didn't let the "establishment" dictate what his behavior should be.
This is an important mark of a free thinking human -
I believe there are many of us who could use a little of that right now.

While I applaud him for doing what he did, you might want to check out his ratings on ratemyprofessor.com

www.ratemyprofessors.com...

Some people say some negative things about him

From July 03

"Weird prof.He's very enthusiastic and very helpful if you ask him for help. But he thinks we're all gonna be physicists and expects us to know MUCH more than we do. His exams are EXTREMELY hard but he bell curves ALOT.I failed the exam and still got A+."

reply to post by tankthinker


How could you even say that? There are alternatives to University. You are absolutely free to take a different route. The University should NOT modify itself just to appease your poor intellectual appetite. I am totally enthusiastic about every dumb little course I take. If you lack the mental faculties to transform all that "stupid information" into something personally valuable, that says a lot about your deficiency in character. I've absorbed everything I can from Anthropology, Philosophy, Math, Economics, Sociology, Game Theory, and much more. I'm ready to write my own god damn treatise on human nature.

I think this all comes down to what we value. If you think something is useless just because you will earn less money from it than learning something else, that's one place we differ. If you think the amount of money you earn is a representation of your "contribution to society" then that's another. Our system for the division of labor in a capitalist society is what is creating these divergences in the perspective of value. I honestly don't blame you. There is an increasing dichotomy between the natural human condition (a desire to be creative, to learn through exploration and freedom of thought) and the societal functions we are expected to play in adulthood and in the labor market in particular. This difference is becoming harder and harder to reconcile as time goes. As capitalism expands, a lot of people are becoming richer by way of extricating this natural human condition, ultimately leading to the ossification of society and its few remaining value systems.

In Canada and the U.S. we are definitely heading toward an information-based, post industrial society. So I believe a lot of these things will be remedied in the future. But it might also place a burden on students and young entrepreneurs to become even more inflexible in the way they receive and process information.

I don't know which way we're heading but we would all be a lot better off if people were just more enthusiastic in their studies, regardless of what they were learning. There is so much that people just don't realize they are capable of. If you are only completing your degree to earn a pay raise at the local firm, and if you're not doing this as a means to advancing your career in some purposeful way, then there is no point of even going. You would be much better off starting your own business, or roughing it out in the private sector through sheer experience and determination, or at least acquiring some basic skills at a technical college.

[edit on 7-2-2009 by cognoscente]