<p>“Do you really think it is more about what the student wants? They are not paying the bills. Can they be objective? Do they have their long-term goals in mind or do they simply want the best grades for the least work?”</p>
<p>Yep, I already went to college. </p>
<p>I don’t care about what my kid’s major is, what classes he wants to take or what his grades are. He is mature enough to know what he wants out of college, the classes he takes and what his long term goals are. </p>
<p>I cannot imagine any situation where I would call my son’s professors. </p>
<p>Some of you have gotten sidetracked on the issue of contacting professors. I never had that in mind. I would hope that parents have some clear, core expectations about what happens in the classroom. I think it matters how a professor designs and executes a course and it probably depends somewhat on whether it is a STEM course.</p>
<p>I don’t think it is a weird question at all. I am surprised that some of you are so hands-off in your thinking. I bet you would care about the service you get from your waitress or waiter at lunch. </p>
<p>For example, do you expect professors to lecture during the majority of class time?</p>
<p>When you pay the tuition bill, what is it that you are paying for? What can the professor do to brighten your child’s future? </p>
<p>In my opinion, it isn’t a very useful question because there isn’t a common sort of college class parents could comment upon, even if all our kids were the same sort of student looking for the same kinds of classes.</p>
<p>Even the question, “do you expect professors to lecture during the majority of class time?” isn’t a good question. There are seminars, language classes, lab classes, etc - where lecture probably wouldn’t be very important. What about those first year writing seminars? For some classes, lecture will be a major component.</p>
<p>Sometimes parents have complained about student’s reading lists, especially that they are too PC. It might be interesting to ask what parents want to see on a reading list, if they care. I don’t care, but advised my kids to check out the reading list and syllabus beforehand to judge whether a class seemed interesting and appropriate to them for them.</p>
<p>There is also discussion here about unfair professors. My advice to my kids was to drop the class. That is the point of the shopping period imho.</p>
<p>The only thing we advised ours was to try to take classes with senior faculty. Sometimes they listened.</p>
<p>Oh please–how can I possibly know what classroom approach is best for any individual class? Why would i have that kind of expectation? My kids took lecture classes, labs, small seminars, classes that mixed approaches. How the class worked and which they chose was between the student and the professor. It was my kids who were receviing the service and best knew what worked. Not me. Whether or not I paid the bill was extraneous to that. They were the ones being educated.</p>
<p>The comparison to a waiter makes no sense to me. If I was eating at a restaurant I would care, sure. But if my kid was eating out without me being present? No. Even if I paid for it, I would have no thoughts whatsoever about the waiter, the food, or anything else. As long as my kid fed himself and/or didn’t ask for more money, it’s all good. </p>
<p>I don’t want this to sound elitist but the comparison of professor to wait person doesn’t really work for me. Are professors service personnel, part of the service industry? If that is your point of view, the question begins to be more understandable. I think the question is based on a misunderstanding of the purpose of a university, but I think it is becoming a more and more common misconception.</p>
<p>“I am surprised that some of you are so hands-off in your thinking. I bet you would care about the service you get from your waitress or waiter at lunch.”</p>
<p>In your example of wait service, I am the consumer. OTOH, my kid is the consumer of his college classes. </p>
<p>“When you pay the tuition bill, what is it that you are paying for? What can the professor do to brighten your child’s future?”</p>
<p>I am paying for my kid to be able to take classes at the school he attends. </p>
<p>As to the second question - I have no idea since I’m not the one taking the classes. </p>
<p>For example, do you expect professors to lecture during the majority of class time?"</p>
<p>Why would I have a universal expectation? Some class topics might lend themselves best to traditional lecture-hall lectures without a lot of interactions. Some class topics might lend themselves to hands-on experimentation, or labs, or small group / Socratic-style discussions, etc. There is no one Platonic form here. </p>
<p>The only thing I didn’t like was when one of my kids (politely and succinctly) emailed a prof about a clarifying question about an assignment and received a snotty note back about “how it’s the weekend for me.” Well, it’s the weekend for my kid, who is spending her entire weekend working on YOUR class, and in the minute it took to make that report, the prof could have clarified the issue. I’m used to the big grownup working world, where of course if my clients / customers contact me over the weekend, I respond as quickly as possible to move things along, not some 1950’s world where everything waits til Monday at 9 am again. </p>
<p>In a restaurant we know what we eat and what to expect. A layman parent does not know what students are supposed to learn and what and how professors are supposed to teach. Even a parent who is a professor teaching the same field that the child studies still does not know what to expect because teaching methods and class expectation vary with students, schools, time,…</p>
<p>I think the only thing the parents can wish to have is the professionalism of the professors.</p>
<p>I expect the overall education to be excellent. I don’t want to have to worry about the details. If I have to get involved in the details (i.e., if a professor is unfair, or unresponsive to my kid, and my kid can’t get an appropriate response), then I would feel that the school isn’t providing me with the value I’m paying for. But I don’t want to know the percentage of lecture time or anything like that. This is a restaurant in which my kid is eating, not me. </p>
<p>Note: I might be interested in some of these details while we are shopping for a college (i.e., size of classes)–but not once the purchase has been made.</p>
<p>This is a strange metaphor to describe the function of the professor and the relationship to the student. The job of a waiter is to make me happy by bringing what I ask for in a timely manner. The job of a professor is not to make anyone happy or follow directions. The job of a professor is to provide an effectively structured opportunity for learning a discipline or body of knowledge. </p>
<p>A student is not my customer. I do not respond to student emails over the weekend either, unless I have specifically decided to do so in advance of an important deadline and have let the students know. I do not believe that “professionalism” requires me to be on call 24/7. Who expects that? Even doctors have answering services that vet calls during non-business hours.</p>
<p>I don’t think it makes any more sense to compare a professor to someone in sales (who may need “to always be closing”) than to a waitperson. That doesn’t mean I don’t respect salespeople or waitstaff. And for the general public defining worth as salary, the sales person probably wins in the respect game. </p>
<p>Different jobs have different reward structures, which is why it is hard to generalize what professionalism means across fields.</p>
<p>No professor is going to benefit either herself or her institution by allowing teaching (which includes student contact) to take up too much of her time. Scholarship (research, writing, and publication) takes place outside of parent and student view, and scholarship is what is going to get one rewarded institutionally. It’s not sell or die, it’s publish or perish. Different incentives create different behaviors among categories of work. </p>
<p>Another sensible question might be whether one might reasonably expect more professorial interaction with students at small liberal arts colleges than research universities.</p>
<p>for some reason this post/thread feels very deja vu.</p>
<p>Since my career has been spent behind the podium in the college classroom, I have expectations of students. My main one is that they have a sense of inquisitiveness about the subject matter – that they not look at a course or a particular assignment as just a requirement or obligation. They should above all come to a course and a class session with questions, take a critical eye toward the conventional wisdom; but all of their “learning” is up to them and the more initiative and energy they give to the material, the more we can help, both inside and outside of class (and often afterwards if they need letters of recommendation to graduate school or in the job market).</p>
<p>In my professorial I’ve seldom had direct contact with parents. One, sadly, was at a student’s funeral. Several others were at commencement. Just one was related to admission (to our graduate program). And just one was related to a grade: in my first year of teaching, a parent contacted me after their daughter had received an unsatisfactory grade in my course; the student herself did not contact me.</p>
That’s exactly an unanswerable question - it totally depends on the class. If I am taking a survey of art history for beginners a slide lecture is a fine way to present the majority of the material. If I’m teaching a course on Chinese Landscape Painting of the Sung Dynasty with six students, having a short paper on the reading and discussion sessions around the table makes a lot more sense. (I took both classes when I was in college and they were both excellent, but taught very differently.) As a small class we could also look at our college’s excellent collection as a class.</p>
<p>And if we are talking restaurants, I expect one thing from my local BBQ joint and another from the one with three Michelin stars. Luckily there’s not quite such a variety in college education!</p>
<p>I would never, never, ever, ever call my D’s professors. When she got her first paper back and it had a grade that she was not used to in high school (where her teachers thought she was the second coming), I told her to go talk to the professor and ask him to tell her how she could improve. She did and has kept it moving. When she told me about an insensitive remark her professor made in class, though I cringed, I asked her how she handled it. She has to pull up her big girl pants. I am here to listen to her vent if she wants, but unless there was something going on that was about to result in her being expelled or severely disciplined, I would stay out of it.</p>
<p>I think I am really hung up on Thanksgiving because the comparison that comes to my mind is cooking a Turkey ! A good college professor is like a great chef cooking a Turkey, maybe its deep fried, roasted, smoked, or BBQ’ed for Mathmom but if it tastes good it is good. </p>
<p>Teaching is a very unique endeavor highly personal and subjective. </p>