【【超越自我小组】】第二次作业-issue 50--马马马

yinhezhixinUID: 2318361

TOPIC: ISSUE50 - "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."
WORDS: 488          TIME: 00:45:00          DATE: 2008-8-6 21:11:51

Is it necessary for all faculty to spent time working outside the academic world in professions relevant to the courses they teach in order to improve the quality of instruction at college and university lever? Some professors who teach social science would find a job easily to get some experience within their fields, while others might find it difficult to get a job. And I wonder whether working experience is helpful for an professor in mathematics to teach his or her students complex theories. So, I concede that their is no need for all faculty to get a job outside school.

Admittedly, the working experience is helpful to the development of knowledge. We gain our knowledge form the experience at the very beginning, then we record it. Our knowledge accumulates with the adding experience of different generations. Not only experience gives us directly knowledge, but inspires us to explore the regulations and correlations among things. Nowadays, a professor who teaches commercial with sufficient experience in this field would help him to give his students more practical knowledge, making students understand complex knowledge more easily.

However, in the modern world, only directly experience is not enough for the development of knowledge. Sometimes, the knowledge goes ahead of practical appliance. Scholars develop researches to check their theory, which need condition that doesn't exist in the outside world. So only ask the faculty work outside their lab to get working experience might have no use to text their theory. For instance, we don't ask Newton to work outside in order to make him better teach students Newton’s Laws.

Further more, in some field, working outside might bring harm to the study of professors, but not benefit. It may take a lot of time for an teacher to work outside school. What's more, when a professor who study theory of chemistry finds a job in a chemical factory while profits not the new discoveries that matter most, the professor might have to give up his own research and devote  to some practical researches which would bring more profits. In such case, working experience might interfere with the research of a professor and render him change his goals for new discoveries.

Finally, there is no doubt that when a student gets more knowledge and more practical experience from the professors might helpful for him to get a better job, but when considering the function of college education, it is more important that students learn to think critically and rationally. A good teacher might give his students such instruction on the thinking skill and ability to analyze. Working outside to get more practical experience would benefit more for the increasing of knowledge, but not the depth of thinking.

In sum, there is no need for all faculty to work outside, though it might helpful for a professor to gain practical experience, it might bring harm to the development of private researches of a professor as well, and add little to the depth of thinking.

[ 本帖最后由 yinhezhixin 于 2008-8-6 22:18 编辑 ]