College teacher

“ In the college such supervision would usually stir deep resentment. The college teacher is, in matters of teaching, a law unto himself. He sees little of the actual teaching of his colleagues; they see as little of his. His contact with the head of his department, and his departmental and faculty meetings, are usually limited to discussions of college policy and of the sequence and content of courses. Methods of teaching are rarely, if ever, brought up for discussion. ”

“ We set up no standards aside from character and scholarship. We do not demand evidence of teaching ability, a knowledge of applied psychology and of accepted teaching practices, skill in presentation, power of organizing material in graded sequence, or ability to frame a series of questions designed to stimulate and sustain the self-activity of the pupils. The born college teacher remains the successful teacher. The poor college teacher finds no agent which tends to raise his teaching to a higher level. The temperamentally unfit are not weeded out. ”

“ Highly specialized and dehumanized knowledge is not as useful for the college teacher as broad and vital knowledge, which is, of course, much harder to acquire. Even in the case of "disciplinary" subjects, there is no gain in concealing the human bearings. The teacher should be trained to seize opportunities in the classroom and out to help the student, through his subject and his maturer life experience, to see the bearing of what he is learning on the life about him and on the life he is to lead. ”

“ In this age of specialization of study it is evident that no college teacher, however wide his experience and extensive his education, can speak with authority on the teaching of all the subjects in the college curriculum, or even of all the major ones. ”

“ As many of the textbooks used by secondary teachers are written by college men, and as the success of these teachers is often gauged by the success of their students who happen to go to college, it is easily seen that there is a serious temptation on the part of the secondary teacher to look at his work through the eyes of the college teacher. ”

“ The greatest thing any friend or teacher, either in school or college, can do for a student is to furnish him with a personal ideal. The college professors who transformed me through my acquaintance with them—ah, they were few, and I am sure I did not have a dozen conversations with them outside their class rooms—gave me, each in his different way, an ideal of character, of conduct, of the scholar, the leader, of which they and I were totally unconscious at the time. ”

“ The utmost that can be said of our college system, as a system, is that it stands on a somewhat higher plane than the schools, that it is supposed to finish a young man's education, and consequently that the men whom it employs for such a purpose—its professors—are, or at least ought to be, abler men than the teachers proper. The difference, then, between professor and teacher is one of degree, and not of kind. ”

“ To be an explorer and a guide in a department of human knowledge is an arduous profession. It admits no half-hearted service.
Of course if the work demanded elsewhere is not serious, the case is different. Rather with benefit than with damage a college teacher may on occasion recast the instruction that was intended for professionals and offer it to a popular audience. In this way a professor makes himself known and makes his college known. Many of the small colleges are now engaging in university extension as an inexpensive means of advertising themselves. ”

“ Experience teaches even teachers, but the price paid must be computed in terms of the welfare of the student. Teaching is one of the arts in which the artist works only with living material; yet college authorities still make no demand of professional training and apprenticeship as prerequisites for admission to the fraternity of teaching artists.
Ineffective college teaching will not improve until professional teaching standards are set up by respected institutions. The college teacher must be possessed of ample scholarship of a general nature. ”

“ You've never been a teacher in a large fashionable college, my boy. When most of your so-called students are taking your course because it is reported to be a snap, so they can spend their evenings at billiards, musical comedies, or the like, any young devil with a ray of intellectual interest becomes the teacher's golden-haired boy. ”

“ It is sad but true that many college teachers are more reactionary in questions of method than the better class of high school teachers. The claim that elementary work in college requires a method different from that used in the high school is one symptom of this, and another symptom of the same tendency is the motto of so many college teachers that there is no "best method," and that a good [Pg 444] teacher will secure good results with any method. ”

“ Then there is in college life association with professors and tutors, and this is, I confess, sometimes of little value, as when teachers are mere machines, but in it, at its best, are distinguishing benefits. When teachers are full men, apt men, and enthusiastic men—as college professors, and for that matter all teachers ought to be—the place of recitation soon becomes a center of power. Tact tests attainment, exposes ignorance, foils deceit, develops strength, indicates lines of discovery, and inspires courage. A living teacher supplies at once model and motive. ”

“ There is quite as likely to be a quickening force in the somewhat remote and mysterious power of the teacher who devotes himself to amassing treasures of scholarship, or to patiently working out the best methods of teaching; who standing somewhat apart, still remains an ideal of the Christian scholar, the just, the courteous man or woman. To come under the influence of one such teacher is enough to make college life worthwhile. ”

“ It is probably true that the ratio of courses on methods to courses on knowledge of the subject will always be largest for the elementary teacher, in view of the great difference between the mental maturity of the student and the teacher, somewhat less for the secondary teacher and least for the college teacher ”

“ Just here lies a difficulty peculiar to the college teacher in this department. All studies that appeal primarily to the intellect and call only for careful attention and vigorous thinking can be prescribed, and mastery of them rigidly enforced. Indeed, the ambitious student is often stimulated to more vigorous effort by the very difficulty of his subject. But the appreciative reading of any work of literature cannot thus be prescribed. Of course the instructor may do much to help the student to such appreciation—that, indeed, is his chief duty ”

“ In a large university, the demand upon the teacher for more work than he should rightfully undertake, the ever-increasing interest of the student in college affairs, with many other influences, are constantly presented as difficulties in the way of the teacher’s close relationship with the student. ”

“ She does not have the strain of passing her whole class in every subject, of finishing her course on schedule time, of cramming for examinations. She has some freedom in the division of her time and a voice in the making of the course and curriculum. The less experienced teacher has in her classroom the assistance and advice of the senior teacher, as well as of the head teacher of her subjects in the head school. Teachers are not rivals, but colleagues as in a college faculty. ”

“ College man and the college woman. **$1.50. Houghton.
“A book especially for “people” who are concerned, either as parents or teachers or simply as good citizens, with college students. It provokes sympathy with the undergraduate’s point of view; it explains persuasively what it is in college life that makes it worth while; it subjects the college to the tests that the man of plain mind applies without sophistry, and shows how the college does, or ought to, meet those tests; it puts into intelligible language the educational ideals of the enlightened college teacher and administrator ”

“ At any rate, in this borderland between cultural and professional studies, where the college is merging with the university or professional school, the necessity for the able teacher is a paramount issue. ”

“ Such teaching on the way to some form of vocation deemed far more honorable was not of a sort to make teaching a profession in itself. Later, some measure of higher education was given young women in Normal Schools to fit them for teaching little children, and the teacher of the elementary school became, thereby, a professional. To-day few young men teach to help themselves through college and only a few choose teaching as a profession. ”

“ You are a product of an entirely different tradition. You were educated, and have previously taught, in a large university, and this makes it difficult, perhaps impossible, for you to appreciate the needs and the point of view of the small college. The ideal of the professor in a university is self-improvement and personal achievement; but in the small college, the teacher is expected to give, above everything else, personal service and devotion to the interests of his students. ”

“ In this matter the smaller universities have a great advantage over the larger ones if they will only be as careful in the choice of teachers. Only those who are near him know that a teacher is great. There are many graduates of our strongest institutions who never in their whole four years came in contact with a professor. Not long since, the editor of an eastern magazine, an able student and a man of strong character, told me that in his college course he had a speaking acquaintance with but one professor. ”

“ Though the purpose of college may still be beclouded, and though there is still much fighting in the dark over the curriculum, at least two things are pretty sure: first, within fairly wide limits, it makes little difference what the undergraduate is taught in his first two years, provided he is really taught; [1] and, secondly, teaching is not a trick that any man can pick up for himself. These two facts leave us with only one thing to do—train graduate students to be college teachers. ”

“ In the first place, up to the present time, as said before, very few prospective college teachers have made any professional preparation for their work as teachers. In the second place, it is the almost universal custom to place the freshmen and sophomores, by all means our largest classes and the ones in greatest need of skilled teachers, in the hands of young instructors who have not yet learned how to teach. ”

“ A discerning observer of college faculties can even today discover in them men and women who entered them by the same door as these great ones of old, irregularly as we would say now,—without the hallmark, and whose good teaching is a surprise to their doctored colleagues. In one institution I know of, the best five teachers some years ago were all of this type. The training of college teachers might well, it therefore seems, include an apprenticeship, beginning with, or in exceptional cases before, graduation from college. ”

“ The ideal school is one in which the pupil is at liberty to get up and leave the class if it becomes irksome, and in which the teacher is expected to comport himself like the kind-hearted captain of the Mantelpiece. The ideal college is one which prepares its students for remunerative positions, which teaches them how to answer the kind of questions that captains of industry may ask. One of the many critics of our educational system has recently complained [Pg 263] that college professors are not practical. ”

“ A vigorous teacher does not assume intention to be ready-made. He counts it his continual office to help in making it. On the middle two quarters of a class he spends his hardest efforts, on 247 students who are friendly to learning but not impassioned for it, on those who like the results of study but like tennis also, and popularity, and cigars, and slackness. The culture of these weak wills is the problem of every college. Here are unintentional boys waiting to be turned into intentional men. What limitations on intellectual and moral vagrancy will help them forward? ”

“ In this same investigation, the time-honored notion that a college education will, irrespective of specialized training, adequately equip a teacher for his work was revealed as a fallacy,—for twenty-eight per cent of the normal-school graduates among all the teachers were in the first and second ranks of efficiency as against only seventeen per cent of the college graduates; while, in the two lowest ranks, only sixteen per cent of the normal-school graduates are to be found as against forty-four per cent of the college graduates. ”

“ Teachers College of Columbia University is on a graduate basis. Though many of the 250 training and normal schools throughout the country do not require a high school diploma for admission, the tendency is wholly in that direction. In no field of professional education has the application of scientific principles to actual practice made such progress as in that of the teacher. ”

“ The literature group is as distinctly of college character as the elementary group is admittedly high school work. It is here, in fact, that the best ideals of the American college find the fullest opportunity. This is true both for the teacher and for the student. In the elementary group, pedagogical skill and a fair mastery of the language are the chief prerequisites of a successful teacher. ”