Great person != great teacher. To be honest, if you watch [1] his lecture, he doesn't grab me as a good teacher. In fact I would probably fall asleep in his lectures. I've seen a lot of professors and how they teach during my undergrad and graduate mathematics education. It's not uncommon to witness a professor who has numerous awards for their research but who is awful as a teacher. It could be lack of motivation on their part for all I know. Dijkstra could be the very best out there in some matters but it doesn't mean we should take after his style of teaching.
To be more specific, Dijkstra's organizational matters make him seem to me as somewhat cold and detached. Watching his lectures on youtube confirms this feeling. He also TEACHES in that way and frankly this is not the best way to get knowledge into students' heads. Nor will students ever feel like he really cares.
Perhaps such a person will be more engaged if he teaches a graduate course with topics from his research but from what I've seen, this is not always the case. In fact, the worst course I ever had was by a professor with numerous awards, who's also great at giving presentations and talks, but who taught his research topics like absolute crap.
> In fact I would probably fall
> asleep in his lectures.
It's not his job to entertain you. It's his job to make the material available for you to study and assimilate, and to provide insight you would find difficult to gain simply by reading from a text. You falling asleep is your problem, not his.
Everything you say sounds plausible, but a recent paper[0] shows that two teachers delivering identical material, one in an organized and engaging manner, the other disorganized and unengaging, received exactly the evaluations you'd expect, but their styles resulted in exactly the opposite.
In particular, lecturer A was engaging and organized, and got excellent evaluations. Lecturer B was disorganized and unengaging. And yet in subsequent courses it was the students of lecturer B who went on to get the higher grades.
Thinking someone is an excellent lecturer is not the same as being taught effectively.
This is a very interesting study, thanks for sharing it. With risk to go against what I said earlier, I have to admit that I've seen the same thing in my own learning and that of some of my peers in my math program. The first two years of math courses were great and we did well and the more advanced ones were, of course, harder but we just couldn't do as well on them as we wanted. However, I'll argue strongly that it's not because our first few teachers were so good, from perspective of evaluation but because the later professors were not up to par.
You see, Calculus courses are taught so much that the material has been developed and optimized to an extent that when I took my Calculus courses, I fell in love with math. Even somewhat more advanced courses like Linear Algebra and Complex Analysis are quite optimized for learning. Go in a little deeper into things like Real Analysis, Group Theory, Abstract Algebra and Galois Theory, and all of a sudden, everybody teaches these courses differently. Of course, these courses are taught less and they are not as optimized. THIS, I will argue is the reason for the decreased performance in the "deeper subjects".
Let me use an analogy. Let's say your first big relationship is with a really easy-going happy person and you have great times but eventually you have to part ways for some arbitrary reasons. Some time later you get into a second big relationship and this time the other person is difficult. They are battling through a lot of childhood issues and have problems with self-esteem. All of a sudden, you find yourself unable to deal well with this person, eventually you break it off.
Now, was your lack of "performance" in the second relationship due to the first one being so good or due to the second one being so crap?
Now, from the paper's conclusion:
> A final, more cynical, explanation could
also relate to student effort. Students of low-value-added professors in the introductory course may increase effort in follow-on courses to help “erase” their lower than expected grade in the introductory course.
I have seen and experienced this all too often. Case in point - one of my friends got a C in Calc 1 but went on to get A's in the next few Calc courses.
>Thinking someone is an excellent lecturer is not the same as being taught effectively.
This a thousand times. Most student evaluations are garbage.
>It's not his job to entertain you. It's his job to make the material available for you to study and assimilate, and to provide insight you would find difficult to gain simply by reading from a text. You falling asleep is your problem, not his.
No, but at the same time, we can and should look to optimize the ways in which we deliver material.
I agree that student evaluations are mostly garbage but they have saved me from bad professors at times. You just have to know what you are looking for. The reason evaluations are bad is that you can't just put a point scale on a professor and hope things will go alright. If you look at ratemyproffessor you'll see a lot of people giving bad rating because tests and homeworks were hard. This is BAD. You'll also see a lot of good ratings because the professor was easy. This is also bad.
You want to look at the ratings that talk about the teacher's engagement in the teaching process, not in how difficult their material is. Case in point - I had an amazing Group Theory teacher and the assignments and final were really difficult. You'd expect that some people will not distinguish the two aspects of teaching and slap on a bad rating because it's so difficult. Others will see the difference and give a good rating for teaching and describe the course as difficult.
I meant the evaluations conducted by the school. The questionnaires are usually terrible, and the students don't know how to answer them.
>ratemyprofessor
ROFL. If I ever get an overall good rating on ratemyprofessor, I will seriously start to question myself. That thing is a popularity contest. Some of the absolute worst on there have great ratings. Some of the comments might be useful, but that's about it.
To be more specific, Dijkstra's organizational matters make him seem to me as somewhat cold and detached. Watching his lectures on youtube confirms this feeling. He also TEACHES in that way and frankly this is not the best way to get knowledge into students' heads. Nor will students ever feel like he really cares.
Perhaps such a person will be more engaged if he teaches a graduate course with topics from his research but from what I've seen, this is not always the case. In fact, the worst course I ever had was by a professor with numerous awards, who's also great at giving presentations and talks, but who taught his research topics like absolute crap.
[1]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNCAFcAbSTg