Why Research Professors Need to be Able to Teach

I have reached the point as a teacher that it is sometimes painful to be a student. Not because of any requirements of the class, but because some of the professors assigned to teach graduate courses are so clearly the stereotypical brilliant scientist who can't present to save a life.

One of the professors co-teaching my only class this semester clearly falls into this category. After slowly and awkwardly dispensing with the typical course announcements, he began his lecture with a long, sometimes convoluted story about the importance of Galileo's discovery of moons orbiting Jupiter. Registration to this course may be offered through five different departments, but not one of them has anything to do with astronomy. It wasn't until we moved on to the history of understanding the function of the heart (and in case you hadn't guessed, none of the departments has any interest in anatomy, either) that he finally managed a clear statement of the point, which is that humans use metaphors to understand complex ideas. At this point, about half my attention was devoted to wondering at what point in the lecture his apparent need to cling to the whiteboard shelf for support would result in the destruction of the dry-erase artwork behind him.

What seems so terrible about this is that it isn't just teaching. In fact, most of my teaching skills have been built by my advisor's insistence on decent presentations of our research in our lab meetings, defenses, and annual department presentations. Make sure they know the point you're going to make. Repeat the point so often even those dozing in the back of the room might pick it up. Explain how every piece of data you're throwing on the screen supports that point, and explain it explicitly. Professors at an R-I like my school are research scientists first, teachers only to keep the graduate students occupied, but by dint of research presentations you'd think they could pull together a decent lecture on automatic.

In this case, I distinctly remember being impressed by this professor's research presentation a year ago. In retrospect, however, I was no doubt impressed by the research despite the presentation, not because of it. This professor has a "cool" or "sexy" research topic, and he had cool toys with him to show off as demonstrations of that research. He can impress people with his research just by the nature of his research; he doesn't have to "sell" the importance or convince people that it's interesting. While he has obviously chosen a great field to be involved in, it has done him absolutely no good in terms of his presenting skills. Sooner or later, he's going to need to sell his research, and he won't be able to. It's not just for the students' sake that research professors should still be decent teachers, it's for the professors' sake as well.

Meanwhile, I will attempt not to wince in sympathy or zone out staring at birds outside the window while he lectures.

(And he never quite leaned back far enough to smudge the dry-erase artwork. It was actually quite fancy doodling, so I doubt it will have been erased in the past 48 hours. If it's still there, I might have to start taking mental bets on how long it lasts).

Graduate vs. Undergraduate Classes

The classes I have taken in graduate school have all been "seminars". These generally take the structure that [appears to] gives the professor no duties beyond selecting papers and assigning grades. When I first came to grad school, with the ink still wet on my college diploma, I was thrilled. The "senior seminar" I took the last semester of college was of the same format, I had loved it (although perhaps that was due to the home-baked treats the professor's wife provided each week), and I was looking forward to more of the interactive, discussion-based classes rather than being lectured at.

Now, I am enrolled in one of the peculiar mixed undergraduate-graduate classes. Graduate students are held to higher standards and have more assignments than the undergraduates, but the class time is the same. I find myself absolutely thrilled with the experience. We sit in rows facing the projector, rather than in a half-circle facing each other! We get out of the classroom after just an hour twice a week, instead of after three hours straight once a week! I get to be taught by an actual professor, rather than by my equally-inexpert fellow graduate students! I am asked specific, factual questions rather than being asked to pontificate on about my opinion! Most importantly - most refreshing - we are discussing basic concepts rather than the pluses or minuses of broad theories or specific experimental design!

Not all the changes are positive, of course. The student's work in a seminar class is usually to read the papers, participate in class and "lead" the class discussion once or twice a semester. For the degree-requirement classes there were usually some form of reading reaction and a final paper, but the "upper-level" seminars don't usually bother. This mixed, undergraduate-style class had me spending a good five minutes entering the various reading reactions, homework sets, and larger assignments into my calendar. Barely a week will pass without me having to turn in a reading reaction or homework set. My field is not one generally given to "homework sets", except for the basic stats class, so that's a novelty in itself.

I can certainly understand why professors prefer to minimize course preparation if at all possible. But if the real reason this course seems so wonderful is just the change of pace from the classes I've been taking the past few years - as the seminar did at the beginning of graduate school - then I have to seriously argue in favor of offering graduate students more classes instead of seminars. Even the professor seems far more engaged in this environment than in the traditional "seminar" I took with him last year. The enthusiasm for a different style of learning is going to carry over into whatever subject matter is presented, with the potential of making me fond of a subject matter when I only enrolled in the course because it's related to my advisor's other line of research and meets some degree requirements.