Posted on 10/21/2022 8:25:43 AM PDT by lowbridge
An NYU chemistry professor who claimed he was fired after students complained that his class was too hard said colleges “coddle” students instead of helping them succeed with “tough love.”
Maitland Jones Jr. taught at the expensive Manhattan private school for 15 years before he was canned ahead of the fall semester after a student petition alleged that his organic chemistry class was too difficult to pass.
“Organic chemistry is a difficult and important course,” he wrote in an op-ed published in the Boston Globe Thursday.
“Those of us who teach it aim to produce critical thinkers, future diagnosticians, and scientists.”
The 84-year-old said he has witnessed a decline in student capacity in recent years as well as administrators bending to the wishes of students more often than not,
“Deans must learn to not coddle students for the sake of tuition and apply a little tough love,” Jones wrote. “They must join the community in times of conflict to generate those teachable moments.”
He said professors now fear teaching demanding material and assigning low grades to students who perform poorly because they worry they’ll face punishment.
“[Young professors’] entire careers are at the peril of complaining students and deans who seem willing to turn students into nothing more than tuition-paying clients,” Jones said.
The ex-teacher said the students must learn to accept failure and grow from their mistakes. He argued doing so is a vital life skill today’s students aren’t getting.
“Students need to develop the ability to take responsibility for failure,” he wrote. “If they continue to deflect blame, they will never grow… Failure should become a classic ‘teachable moment.'”
Jones, who previously taught at Princeton University, said he watched a decline in students’ attendance and participation in his class over the past couple of years.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
There’s always avenues, it just seems to me(FWIW) that EE is more broad in application.
I was headed the EE direction very early. To wit, I disassembled a telephone set my parents purchased as a Christmas gift and explained it to my kindergarten class. Nothing fancy. Push the call button and the other end rings. I found Tesla's biography in the school library in 2nd grade. Fascinating read. In 3rd grade, I was checking out electronics books (tube oriented). I learned to read schematics and figure out circuit operation. Roll forward to 1980...I'm drawing a schematic on the whiteboard in the microprocessor class. Another instructor walks in and says, "we haven't drawn schematics like that for 25 years". Yup. That's when I learned how to read/write schematics. I need to update to current standards. The schematic capture, board layout and auto-router programs do most of that for you today. I just do that for single sided boards for my home projects. The contracted vendors do 5 layer boards with surface mount and re-flow fabrication.
My son is somewhat annoyed at how Heaviside simplified Maxwell's equations to exclusion of gravitation. How many rabbit holes have we pursued because of oversimplification?
It sounds like you were a natural born EE. I was a late bloomer. I was into military, police, and sports.
EE was definitely a better path, after I did my USAF enlistment.
The USAF helped me get my act together, and paid for school.
Definitely the most important decision, and time, in my life.
“I for got to post...I didn’t find Organic Chemistry “difficult”, but laborious. “
For the instant-gratification class of students today, you’ll off 2/3 of them with laborious.
Thanks, I ended up with n EE when I realized it was the only major I could finish with the plan I started with in 4 years. You were right I was never lacking for work but I went back to school for a teaching credential when I thought it would be more rewarding. I had to go back to engineering when teaching jobs dried up. Actually I liked both jobs even though I retired with an EE pension.
Had more fun teaching and coaching at the high school level.
I have to say I would have probably enjoyed Chem but you are right about more degrees. I ended up with a lot of school but it was reimbursed by my company.
Nice. Are you totally retired now?
Oh he did indeed
The saying around the engineering school was it was the only place that absolute zero existed
Optics and electro dynamics
Human beings are outsourcing the memory stuff to computers.
Has anyone noticed that doctors use the computer to prescribe medicines. They are mostly drones, the MD’s I mean. They are superceded in common sense and knowledge by PA’s in a lot of cases.
What happens when the grid goes down, for say a few thousand years?
On a serious note, the average life span goes down a bunch.
I’m a big advocate of taking care of one’s self and not relying on Doctors unless necessary.
My work situation changed in May 1983. I left the equipment engineering department and moved to the computer support systems at Pacific Telephone. First assignment was site support for PREMIS/LAC. Later, SOAC/LFACS. My tasking included building the UNIX systems for the UNIVAC 11/64 and 11/92 systems. It was a full time job and almost a 45 mile drive to the college from my office in Miramar. I decided not to return to teach in Fall of 1983. From that point forward it was hard core software development. I was writing in C/C++ in 1983. Pacific Telephone had source code access to UNIX and my organization had added to C++ via Bjarne Stroustrup's work. Thankfully the early CFRONT C++ front ends saw huge improvements with the advent of the GCC compiler. I was able to leverage C++ in Xenix, HP-UX and the hybrid System V/BSD UNIX delivered on the CCI Power6/32(Tahoe) supermini computers.
I'm approaching retirement and still building systems using Linux, Java, Spring Boot, kubernetes, and helm to port traditional dedicated server application into containerized microservice architectures. I had though about resuming teaching in retirement, but I'm not sure if the university systems will survive COVID and the woke stupidity.
Yes, I live in San Jose in a retirement community— I would still be teaching at SJSU if I hadn’t run into a health issue— it turns out that for years I had pretty severe sleep apnea and it was weakening me while I slept
Much better now while sleeping with a ventilator.
You, still working?
I’m in my 40’s, so I’m still working.
It’s 100% remote. I design in Mass, CT, and NH.
Live outside Philly.
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