Issue50 我的第一篇issue

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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."

Nowadays, it indeed happens that in college and university many subjects, the content of which is out of date, require much effort to learn yet offer little help for students to get employment. A popular idea to change this situation is to require all teachers to spend sometime working outside the school. However, this idea is obviously over simplified and excessive. In my opinion, whether or not a teacher should work part-time outside the school is never a simple question. It requires detailed, case-by-case examination.

Admittedly, for a variety of courses, the experience gained by working outside may help a teacher understand his or her course better. By saying this I mean he or she could realize which part of the course is more widely used today so that he or she could rearrange the time allocated for each part of the course. Relatively more important parts deserve more time and emphasis. Then students may be more skillful and thus may be more competent after stepping into society. Taking my personal experience as an example, in data structure course, although linked list is the most basic sort of data structure, my teacher who has experience writing software for company emphasized more on stack and tree because stack and tree are more widely used when one actually programs software.

Moreover, the working experience in the outside world may help the college and university see the oversight of its curricula. Teachers may find out some significant skills or abilities that are not trained in their college or university. This discovery would help them redesign curriculum according to the requirement of the outside world. For example, a teacher who takes a part-time job in a software company may find out that most of the software is programmed in Java script, which is not introduced in his college. He then may advise the college to add this new course. Finally, Java script course is added to the curriculum of corresponding majors and students are able to get approach to a new programming language and in result may be more competent when applying for a job.

However, this go-out- to-work plan does not work well for all the subjects. Let’s take mathematics as an example. Since mathematics is one of the most basic and most important subject, its content is unlikely to change and its usefulness is indisputable throughout all the professions. Therefore, the benefits of work experience of mathematics teachers are neglectable since they have to teach the way they did.

What’s more, working outside the academic world may impede teachers’ devotion to teaching. Imagine an economy teacher who runs his own company off campus. How could he possibly prepare lectures as earnestly as before? More excessively, imagine that this teacher has earned a lot of money from his company and now decides to leave his position as a teacher. Then, this is definitely not an improvement but a loss to the college.

In sum, it is never easy to judge whether a teacher should spend time working outside or not. What we are supposed to do is to carefully analyze each case, measure its benefits and loss before we get to our conclusion.

提纲:
站在中间立场
1. 好处 帮助老师发现自己课程更重要的部分,合理分配时间
2. 好处 帮助老师建立新课程
3. 坏处 有些科目不一定用得上,比如数学
4. 坏处 牵扯精力
结尾
谢谢