Mental wrote:Sine, if you took high school Spanish and it was useless, I can't help that, but mine was excellent. Part of the problem I had at Stanford is that my high school teachers were such better teachers than my Stanford professors that I just ended up hating the whole lot (or the greater part of the lot) of my professors.
At universities (not small teaching colleges), professors are generally hired for their ability to do research, not their ability to teach. For many professors, research is their job, teaching just pays the bills. To be fair, I've had many good professors and many poor middle and high school teachers. In my experience, the distribution of good and poor teachers is about the same at the college level as it is at the middle and high school level. While middle and high school teachers are actually <i>taught</i> how to teach, it's not as hard to become one. Professorships are hard to come by.
My department is going through the interview process; we went through it last year, too. This year we're interviewing mostly people who have assistant or full professorships from other universities, but last year it was all fresh PhDs.
What I found surprising, and even a little disconcerting, was that I had as much teaching experience as some of these new PhDs. (I've taught intro to programming labs.) It seems like we just kinda hope people figure out how to teach while they get their PhD. Then they become professors and start grooming the next crop of academics. And that's how our system works.
With all of the candidates I've seen go through the interview process here, this year and last, it's research, research, research. That's what they talk about, that's what we ask about. And my school has a strong undergraduate teaching reputation.
