本帖最后由 jinziqi 于 2010-2-2 00:11 编辑
50. In order to improve the quality of instruction at the college and university level, all faculty should be required to spend time working outside the academic world in professions relevant to the courses they teach.
The author claims that all faculty need to find a relevant job in the society to improve the quality of instruction, which I can’t totally agree with. On one hand, it is really helpful to ask teachers to go outside academia to see the real society. On the other hand, it is hard to find a suitable job for some professors in literature field or art field, and it is also difficult to keep a balance on working well in a job and teaching well in the class at the same time. So, the author should not simply ask teachers to go outside the academy to work, but to think the issue from a whole perspective.
In some fields, such as the electronic engineering and computer science, it is indeed helpful for faculty to see how the society applies what they have taught in the class to the reality. For most colleges and universities, education among undergraduates is the most fundamental, which is mainly to cultivate one’s interest so that he can choose a direction to develop in the future. If professors know well about how every aspect is being developed in the society, he can tell the true story in the real world to motivate students and encourage them to devote in one of directions in the area to develop it or discovery. Take the 3G as an example, if a professor knows the technique well in the market, he can not only teach the principle of 3G to his students, but also tell students about how the technique was developed to be applied in the real society and what kind of difficulty did they meet when spreading it to the world. These kinds of facts can tell students how to achieve their dream in the real society, which cannot be read in textbooks.
However, in other fields which are more theoretical, it is difficult to find a suitable job in the society. For some professors whose major is math or physics, they may always stay in labs to compute a complicated condition or try to design an experiment to prove a theory to work out more issues, which is good for him to improve his ability in research, so that he can teach students clearly about the principles in one area. But because they lack of knowledge of other applied subjects, their talents will be wasted on a specific job.
In addition, it is hard to balance the work and teaching at the same time. If a teacher, who teaches archaeology, goes outside the campus and finds a job and he is assigned to a village which is a long distance from the college, how can he teach in the class? It is true he will gain a lot of experience in the true condition when they excavate a body or a tomb, but he will definitely lose the opportunity of having classes for having no time. For these kinds of areas, some friends, working in the real environment, may be enough to know more information in detail about the real work. So, professor can ask them to make up the disadvantages. The most effective things that professors should teach his students are ways to research and how to make full use of one’s imagination to improve the area.
To sum up, making faculty go outside the academic world can do help sometimes, but for some professors, it is hard to put it into practice. The author should think this issue from an overall situation to fit for all faculty. | 
发表于 2010-2-2 00:07:50
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