<p>jym626. I hope you are on West Coast.</p>
<p>Nope-- I just didn’t realize how late it was! Lets all head over to sinners alley for a cold one.</p>
<p>Actually, I have had a drink with FC. Have met him, and he has met my s, and my s has met his dau. We really are a congenial bunch around here.</p>
<p>BTW, I just testified in a PI case last week.</p>
<p>Had a trial in NO several years ago and still have an account at Galatoires. Happy to to buy you a drink next time everyone available.</p>
<p>Will something bring you to NOLA? We’ll travel there for our kids, the music and the food. What neck of the woods are you in?</p>
<p>Hate to give up the air of mystery.</p>
<p>While grad students are not as common at Tulane as other schools, they do have them instructing classes. In the past 2 years, I’ve had maybe 3 or 4 grad students as the instructors for class. That being said, I’ve never had any complaints about them, and the only professor I ever did have a problem with was a tenured math doctor.</p>
<p>Just returned from a nice walk with spouse to the nearby mexican restaurant, where we split a pitcher of margaritas. Guess you and FC were there in abstentia</p>
<p>I’m mostly a lurker, but have to agree. I appreciate the work you two, but please leave the kids that are actually taking classes at the school and living the dream to comment with their opinions, without constantly affirming what they are saying/telling them are silly because Tulane is awesome and nothing can possibly be wrong. There are good and bad things about Tulane, it kids are the most unbiased when it comes to talking about these issues. I’ve noticed this on many boards. We just want our voice out there without being attacked. </p>
<p>In my opinion, professors are hit and miss. You can’t go by a “rating system.” Some are wonderful and become lifelong friends. They are geniuses in their fields and make the subject become alive. Some stand up there with a powerpoint and hit a clicker for fifty minutes. You can leave some language classes speaking fluently after two or three courses, and others you can take through the maximum levels and not be able to ask for directions. It’s something you’d find at any school. As a student that took sixteen credits at her local (state) university, while still enrolled in high school, I can attest that, in general, Tulane professors are much more intellectually stimulating. You’re getting a good renaissance education, even if you don’t realize it. </p>
<p>The only real problems I’ve had with poor quality professors would be with my Tides (Haunting in Louisiana), a visiting sociology professor, the Hebrew department in general, and an American Literature course, taught by a woman who thought Hemingway wrote Moby Dick, and “Gothic” and “Romantic” genre literature were the same thing. Also a biology lab, but that was mostly a language barrier. Our TA was a genius. The rest weren’t gold—I’ve only had about three or four ‘you blow my mind’ professors—but someone shouldn’t expect a Hallmark movie plot with every class.</p>
<p>So cheer up.</p>
<p>We need current students to post current information about their experiences with faculty and staff- so please, don’t lurk-- post more often with your experiences and comments.</p>
<p>If you read the Tulane (and other) thread posts, you will see that most posters, parents and students, have been fair and honest with their opinions and comments. No school is perfect, and criticism is appropriate and helpful. Personally, I have had many issues with TU and have been more than willing to be vocal. What I cannot stand, regardless of the thread it is in, is unnecessary and/or grossly inaccurate criticism for the sake of being confrontational and/or inflammatory. It is unpleasant, and I will continue to challenge that. The posts in this thread that were abusive and inflammatory were removed. What looks like happened here is that there were some misinterpretations of some posts and people got offended. It happens. But for the most part it looks like it was clarified and people moved on. So it goes.</p>
<p>** btw, my s has had some professors that he flat did not care for and in several cases much preferred the grad student that handled the lab or break-out smaller colloquium (or whatever it is called). All schools have good and bad professors.</p>
<p>tulanechild - I don’t think I have told someone their opinion of a professor was “silly”. As far as affirmation, I am left wondering when that became a bad thing. As jym says, the “attacks”, as you call them, are vitually always directed at people that come on here with misinformation, have no ties to Tulane and clearly are being boorish for no discernable reason, and create false impressions of a city and school that already have their share of PR issues, mostly born of highly biased/ignorant reporting.</p>
<p>I also encourage students to come on here as much as possible to give the story as they see it. But this is not a forum for students only. If you want that, create it!</p>
<p>It occurs to me to add that the number of current Tulane students that post seems pretty limited. There have been a number of threads in the past where the OP either explicitly stated they wanted replies from current students or it was obvious from the post topic, and there were either no replies for quite some time, or maybe one response.</p>
<p>I think it is fair to say when it comes to the Tulane forum (and maybe others, but I wouldn’t know), that the majority of posters are prospective students and parents/alums. Whether this reflects the majority of actual users of this forum is hard to say, since we cannot know how many lurkers out there, like yourself, are current students. Personally, I would love it if people like yourself got on regularly to give their view of questions that are asked. It just seems that once one gets into Tulane and gets busy with classes, activities, etc. either this forum is not as interesting (which I would totally get), or there just isn’t time (which I get as well). If that is wrong, then I hope more current students come on regularly to post and keep me honest.</p>
<p>Getting back to the original post, I just heard from my daughter that a very green, and hugely ineffective young female grad student is teaching her long calculus class. Apparently she has little to no teaching experience and is very nervous. The teacher has left the room a few times (maybe to sob in the hallway) and all the students were asking each other what’s going on. My daughter wants me to send her notes and tests from High School calculus so she can reteach herself and pass the tests. surely there is nothing I can or should do but it is a little frustrating.</p>
<p>
Sure there is. The head of the math department is Morris Kalka. <a href=“mailto:kalka@math.tulane.edu”>kalka@math.tulane.edu</a></p>
<p>Write, call, do both. You are (presumably) paying big bucks for your daughter to get a Tulane education. Universities may be a rather unique business, but they are a business. If the product they are giving you is not meeting expectations, you complain. I can understand wanting to let the students handle it in some areas, but this would be rather intimidating for most first week freshmen, I would think. It seems to me, anyway, that this is a circumstance where it is wholly appropriate for the parent to step in after talking it over with their child first.</p>
<p>Tulane is better than what you describe. They have to be told. Kalka may have no idea the instructor is out of her depth, if no one says anything.</p>
<p>We may be seeing the effects of the larger than projected enrollment. This has happened before at other schools as well.</p>
<p>It is a frequent complaint at many other schools, but nonetheless I need to issue a mea culpa. When I said Tulane had stated that all courses were taught by faculty members, I was remembering what I read about Honors Courses, where they do indeed state (second sentence):
</p>
<p>The statement that is made on the Tulane Undergraduate Admissions site, under the Academics heading is
</p>
<p>Nevertheless, I do not remember seeing complaints like these last year, so either there really are more grad students having teaching assignments, or this years crop is not as talented in teaching, or both I guess. That’s all I know at this point.</p>
<p>Yup, idad, that’s exactly what we postulated here yesterday.</p>
<p>I also agree that if a faculty member is terrible, the dept head needs to know. Better to address it now than when its farther into the semester and hard to fix the mess.</p>
<p>I had a professor in grad school that was, sadly becoming increasingly cognitively impaired as the semester progressed. There was one particular exam that was an absolute joke, made absolutely no sense. I got the highest grade of 96-- which was apparently calculated with a curve that doubled the base grade and then added 10!!! LOL!! Needless to say we had a bit of a talk with the Dept Chair and the situation was addressed.</p>
<p>I’m a freshman at Tulane… thought I’d say what I think of my professors so far</p>
<p>Honors Theatre: Excellent… the professor is hilarious but also really knows what she’s talking about
Honors Philosophy: Average. The lectures aren’t interesting and the pace of the class is very slow. I had a much better philosophy class at a low-ranked university near where I’m from ( I took dual-enrollment courses in high school)
Lit and Film: Poor-Average. The format of the class is unorganized and the professor is not very articulate
Acting: Average - somehow I ended up in a non-major, beginning acting class, so the pace is too slow for me. The professor is passionate about what she does, though, but she doesn’t teach a lot… so far we’ve learned nothing.
TIDES: Excellent - the professor is hilarious and totally chill</p>
<p>I can shed some light on the Math Professor/Grad Student Issue:</p>
<p>Every semester, lower level math courses (100-200 level) are often taught by Graduate Students. The “Lab” section is always taught by a Graduate Student. Younger Graduate Students ALWAYS start out teaching the Labs, but at the end of the semester, students in their lab are required to fill out an evaluation of the TA and give them a grade on how good they thought they were (A-F). The higher ranked, older graduate students are given their own sections to teach, while the younger TAs (or ones that were poorly rated), remain teaching the once a week lab. </p>
<p>This brings up an interesting point, this means that the TAs that get their own section must’ve impressed some students that they taught in the lab class (at least relative to other TAs).</p>
<p>Also, one thing that was mentioned in the original post was that the OP noted the Professor was switched to a graduate student. Apparently, a few years ago, the Math Department kept the Professor you registered for a secret until right before classes started (around a week or two prior to the first session). Recently, however, they’ve started to list the professors teaching each class during registration… catch being that you’re not necessarily guaranteed to get whom you registered for. In fact, of the 4 courses I’ve registered for in the Math Department, 3 of them had a professor mysteriously switched out for another, reasons unknown. I stuck with the guy I got for Calc II, which ended up being good since he was an excellent instructor. However, the other times it happened, I ended up switching to a different section after the switches were made and dropped the other course altogether. As a student, I’m not sure I’m for the switching as it just comes off to me as sketchy. Not much I can do about that though <em>shrugs</em>.</p>
<p>All in all, the Graduate Students and Post-Docs, despite having less experience in teaching math, seem to be fairly popular among students on average when compared to the general student opinions on many of the actual Professors.</p>
<p>Maybe its a giant statistical probability experiment being run by the math department :)</p>