How does UChicago compare with Ivy leagues??

sakky
Thu, 10 Nov 2005 11:40:40 +0000

Kjoodles, not really. It depends on what you mean by ‘best’. Just because you’re a great researcher doesn’t mean that you’re a great teacher. There’s a big difference between having the ability to make groundbreaking discoveries and having the ability to communicate your ideas clearly to people who are at a much lower level than you. Teaching is a skill unto itself. It’s really about how you communicate, how you demonstrate, how you engage your students, and how you are able to pick up on cues that your students don’t understand something.

In fact, I would argue that in many cases (not all, but many), teaching ability and research ability are inversely correlated. Teaching is a skill that takes time to learn and practice. It’s not like you can just get up in front of a class and start teaching a good class. Good teaching requires that you spend time developing good lectures, good lesson plans, that you practice your public speaking skills, etc. Lots of star researchers would rather not spend that time, preferring to work on their research. You also get the ‘frustration’ factor, particularly when teaching low-level undergraduates. Lots of star researchers in esoteric disciplines like physics don’t want to spend time teaching basic concepts. If you’re a Nobel Prize winner in Physics, you don’t want to be spending your time explaining basic force diagrams to freshmen. You’d rather be talking about your research, but your research is obviously far too complicated for most freshmen to understand, and it’s easy for you to get frustrated. That’s the same reason that star athletes often times make for poor coaches, because they just can’t understand why their players are not as good as they were.

The point is, taking a class from a star researcher often times means disorganized and desultory lectures. I would personally rather learn from a person who isn’t quite as famous, but has spent more time developing teaching skills.