Do teachers even Teach anymore?

[tonynoriega]

with the advance of technology... online apps, web resources, sites,...etc..etc..

do teachers even "teach" anymore?

or

do they come to class (late), after the student aid has started the class....

say something like "check my twitter for your assignment"

"download the PDF and review it"

"be ready for a test on Friday"

"oh, can anyone tell me group atomic carbon is from?"

"see you all tomorrow"

[swa66]

I'm an academically trained engineer.
On the entry exam (before you're allowed to start the studies), an algebra professor asked a pretty hard question -in my opinion at the time at least-. But after some sweat, I figured out a way to solve it and all I know is that it was good enough as they let me in.
After having that same professor for a year teaching more advanced algebra, at the end of the year at the exam, I got the same identical question.
The professor was almost 70, and many students assumed he was a bit senile.
When sitting at his table to explain it, like most of our professors he started by asking how it went, I hinted at it that I had seen that question before and still knew how to crack it. He smiled and simply said: well the first time you had most likely never seen such a problem before and at the time it was a test of being an engineer: solve the unknown. Then I was interested in how you attacked a problem. Solving it wasn't all that important. Now I need to make sure you guys paid attention and all of you can solve simple things like this.

In hindsight the courses that teach skills and those that teach "being an engineer". Only the latter stays with you forever. The first needs maintenance of using the skills.

[ergophobe]

Swa,

I think some of the skills an engineer learns are useful, though of course nobody programs in the languages I learned in college (FORTRAN, Pascal PDP-11 Assembly language), so the "nuts and bolts" stuff is the least useful part of the education. It always shocks me when I see university courses that teach a language syntax or, worse, that teach a software package as the primary curriculum.

In the humanities, though, it's even more true. I had a professor of religion tell me: "I don't care if my students remember one single fact from my course. The ones who need to know that stuff are going to grad school and they'll get it again. The rest never need to know it. But no matter what they do for careers, they all need to know how to pick up a book and teach themselves something new, how to integrate that into their lives and how to express it to others. The actual material in my class is just a means to teach them to think and learn on their own."

He was the head of the department and that philosophy permeated the department and was what got me so fired up about the humanities that I ended up as a historian, not a programmer.

BTW, the same prof once told me that his method for getting students engaged in class was to say more and more outlandish things in class until finally someone would say "Hey, I don't believe that." Then he could say, "Why not?"
"It just can't be true?"
"Why not?"
"Well, people don't think like that?"
"What's your evidence? I gave you my evidence and my argument. What supports your side?" And so on.

I asked him, "What if you have a class of students so passive that no matter what you say, they just write it down and take it as true."

He said, "That almost never happens. On the rare occasions that it does, frankly, it serves those students right."