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Old 02-09-2007, 15:54   #6
Beorn
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Join Date: Oct 2005
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I stumbled upon this in the news:



http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2007/...r.html?ref=rss

A polar bear has decided that it liked the heat of North West Territories. Heat as in 15°C during the summer, -50°C in the winter. It's much warmer than the arctic ocean's coast, still. Makes you wonder what brought her there. Maybe menopause.

Anyways the summer is coming to an end and despite the hayfever, it feels much better now that it's windy in the day and cold at night. I passed the 1900 km mark and will probably hit 2000 next week-end for the annual (65km + 40km round trip getting there) ride with the math dpt around the Orléans Island. Hopefully I can double that, next summer, if I can keep away from injury. I just might reach 3000 this year - I definitely will beat 2500. Last year I did 1500 but I wasn't half as well geared up, and I had a car for most of the average-long runs I do on bike now.

So I'll be having an internship at a local college and I like the mentor teacher they paired me with. Simple, genuine, raw and most of all he loves his job. One thing he told me, which I found really interesting and to which more people here will relate than the math and the biking, is that there were once (years ago, in the US) serious recommendations from (at least one, probably among others) a university sociology study to reform the university professor recruiting and teaching system.

While the core of researchers that essentially form the current university professorate (sp, ww?), there could be 2 other classes of professors, namely scholars and educators. All 3 would do a little bit of lower, higher teaching and research, but they'd have distinctions in tasks.
Educators would be Ph.D's in their discipline with the desire to teach. They would handle most, if not all, undergraduate courses and study projects. They'd be in charge of program committees and student activities.
Scholars would act as an in-between class, ideally being low-profile researchers with varied interests and good networking. They would give most high-level graduate seminars and be able to participate in both undergrad teaching and graduate research. In a word, they would consolidate the gap between educators and researchers, giving graduate seminars as much for educators as for the grad pupils.

This all would leave plenty of room for researching professors to do what they are in a university to do: research and development.

Now, a lot of current professors wouldn't see themselves as a clear-cut example of either one - some researchers would see scholar status as a downgrade, or some others wouldn't give up teaching to keep researching. Anyways, the pool of professors required as educators and scholars is actually limited, once some wear that hat and spend their work time in classrooms giving and attending seminars. This system is far from perfect; especially from a researcher's point of view, but from a student's perspective it would greatly decrease the mind-boggle associated with climbing the ropes of a department through hostile professors who don't want to bother teaching and zealous researchers who don't think your development as a student/researcher is worth their research time.

I do think that it makes sense for departments to just open their minds to subclasses of professors that aren't meant to be prime researchers but rather educators or consolidating scholars would benefit everyone. It does happen, but in the Uni's I've seen in Canada, it's far from the norm.
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