Re:Screwed up incentives in higher education
by yummyfajitas on Saturday November 27, 2010 @08:54PM
(#1946399)
That's true if all you do is teach Calc 101, but most departments don't let professors do that...
This is not true of anyplace I'm aware of. Every place that I've been to, unless you went out of your way to request it, you taught Calc 1-4, "Math for Non-Math Majors", or perhaps Linear Algebra/Complex Analysis for EE. If you want to teach primarily advanced courses, you need to make special arrangements and you probably need leverage.
Further, even the advanced courses don't change much. My first semester in grad school, I took Real/Complex/Functional Analysis and Algebra. Functional Analysis was the most modern topic - some of the material was developed in the 80's.
I really have no idea where you are getting your information from, but I don't think your college experience was typical.
That's true if all you do is teach Calc 101, but most departments don't let professors do that (they do let staff instructors specialize in one course, however). Smaller courses are the preponderance of the teaching load for a professor, and those courses take a lot of effort. The first-year courses have huge staff infrastructures in place to handle the load, and they don't change quickly because of sheer institutional inertia.
The unstated myth here is that first-year courses are representative of the college experience. They're not. Even at big state schools, the bulk of the instructional effort goes into the higher-level courses, where class sizes are smaller, the students are more engaged, and the curriculum changes more frequently.