I experienced something similar while at UIUC for math, but I passed the comprehensive exams solidly (my first attempt at two of them were thwarted by abnormally difficult exams where almost no one passed).
I ultimately left, but largely due to non-academic reasons combined with the state of Illinois stealing the university's budget allocation. Teaching wasn't too bad, but life in the tech industry sure beats academia.
So, while this is just anecdata and I ultimately chose the second option, my experience researching graduate math departments is that Berkeley is specifically known for this practice and very few other departments are.
Yes, some people didn't finish but math is hard and while the department is large and can be impersonal there were no barriers and efforts were made to assist the students.
The cheap labor argument doesn't really hold water (at least during my time). More students wanted teaching positions than positions were available.
Don't understand your last paragraph. If demand for jobs exceeds supply from the employer, that suggests there will be downward pressure on wages, i.e. the labour becomes even cheaper. Maybe you're suggesting that the jobs can't be that bad if people want to work at them, but that wasn't what I said. I enjoyed being a TA immensely, and it was a flexible job that fit my studies well so I did it even though I had funding - but that doesn't mean I wasn't still massively cheaper for the university than hiring Dr. Coward, or that there wasn't a cynical strategy of getting us students to teach calculus cheaply and then dumping half of us on the street.
(I started my PhD in 2005, and it's possible that this was not the situation at the time and I was acting on outdated information. I don't regret it, though.)
I highly doubt the majority of students at berkeley would be anything other than hard working.
When a test fails a majority of these types of students, you can't blame ineffective learning on students that represent the best of the best.
is the second bit true? why lump mathematics with your leaving of the university?
what does it mean to leave mathematics?
i stopped looking at the stars because i left the business that hires engineers to build commercial lenses?
I did not mean to lump maths and Berkeley together - I happened to leave both at the same time, but that doesn't mean I had to, or indeed that this was necessarily best for me, or would be best for others.
I remember distinctly which professors of mine were effective at conveying the material and an understanding of it vs. those who were not.
Teaching is nothing, research is nothing; grants, tuition, and donations are everything.
I don't know what's sadder, how far universities have fallen, or the fact that there's no sign that these trends are slowing.
They are ill prepared by their degree and can have huge communication or social issues that stand between them and their students.
Administrators usually push to give good grades for colleges with open enrollment. So the classes are easy and the test are easy. Make me sad and is part fo the reason I left working at a University.
I think it was a special form of multi variable, forget what he called it. Lecture was in mining. Honestly I went to lecture too rarely to give fair judgement
That said, I've also had great profs at Berkeley as well, though I suspect they do it out of the love of their profession the subject matter, rather than career advancement.
Pros:
1)He made calculus engaging, exciting, and worth going to for an 8AM class. I never felt like it wasn't worth it. 2)Convinced me to be a math major by inciting my passion for math. 3)He genuinely cares and spend an enormous amount of time working 1-on-1 with students to help everyone. He freely gives out his cell phone number and asks students to call him any time if they need help.
Cons:
1)His class is very poorly structured. No quizzes. The midterms don't count if you don't want them to, which means 100% of your grade can be the final. 2)His Graduate Student Instructors that teach smaller group discussions get carte blanche to be as lazy as they want. They don't have to administer quizzes and the three that I saw didn't give a rat's ass. 3)His exams are a joke. Most of it is literally just memorizing a proof. The basic derivatives and integrals on the test are really easy. Many of the pre-med and pre-Haas students love him because of the easy A's he gives out.
In Summary: The department has valid claims against his classes, but he is doing something Berkeley's math department desparately needs: teaching lower division math better.
"Most of it is literally just memorizing a proof." Proofs are more important than memorizing a formula and forgetting it after a couple of month.
"Convinced me to be a math major by inciting my passion for math." That's way more important than stuffing you with formulas, algorithms and problems. If you have a passion for something, learning comes more easily and naturally.
By giving you confidence and passion, he gave you the greatest gift he could possibly give. You can find theorems, proofs, problems and solutions in countless books. The information is there, all of it. Structured in many different ways. And he gave you the courage to go out and explore. I wish I had that as a freshman. Instead I got fear. Fear of failing. Fear of being mocked in class. Fear of not being good enough. And I cowered in fear. I learned mechanically, memorizing formulas and problems by heart. What good where the quizzes, hard exams and midterms to me when I couldn't understand and apply what I was supposed to be learning?
I didn't go to Berkeley, but I had exams like this - you could pass them without actually understanding the material by memorising everything in sight. Quoting a proof doesn't show that you have any in-depth grasp of the concepts, that you can actually apply them to a problem you haven't seen before.
Besides, the math department isn't a free agent in this. Other departments expect students who have passed math 1A to have certain skills. If the math department was free to teach math 1A as an advertisement for mathematics (the way other departments get to teach their base courses) it would be a much different class. Hell, it wouldn't even be about calculus.
So long as the physicists, economists, chemists etc.. etc.. say "we need students with skills X, Y and Z" there has to be a class whose content (and hence a decent grade in) is X, Y and Z. The name of that class is 1A and it helps no one to just teach a different class under that name without reforming the system.
The math department ALREADY OFFERS OTHER CLASSES DESIGNED TO DO EXPOSE STUDENTS TO MATH IN EXACTLY THE WAY YOU MENTION. These are courses that deliberately avoid the equations and rote memorization that generated so much fear in high school and are designed to be low stress while showing off the wonder and creativity of mathematics.
Unfortunately, few people ever take these courses because students don't want any more math than they have to take and the guidance counselors and university won't push or require them.
As you said about the final (which I wholeheartedly agree with) if you give students the choice how is it the department's fault you take it. Students have a choice to approach math in a more exploratory, more encouraging fashion but they choose to do the minimum needed to take whatever other class they need. It's ironic because that's also what makes calculus so hard for them...they want to apply a rule and confidently move on...not think hard about a math problem in ways that might be dead ends.
That is what's so sad about math education. Understanding comes from trying to fit the concepts together and even (especially) professional mathematicians fail 90% of the time. Students, especially those who haven't done well in math find that very distressing. Hell, pick any subject you aren't good at (which has clear success/failure conditions) and really try to do it well. It makes you feel dumb and you give up. Add to that years of pre-college math (often taught by teachers who themselves seek the reassurance of rote procedure) which brain washes the curious kids into believing that doing math is just applying procedures and it's an uphill battle.
Ultimately, I think the problem is that we try and force kids who aren't really interested to know math they don't need. Just like other subjects let the students who want to learn come to you. With the advent of modern computer algebra system no one benefits making kids memorize rote procedures beyond basic arithmetic since without understanding they will never apply it in the real world.
Oxford and Cambridge have a very strong culture of small-group tuition, where the tutor ("supervisor") has an enormous amount of freedom. And students typically have end-of year exams -- everything up until that is formative.
If you look at it from a semester course-by-course system's perspective it would seem very strangely designed. But Oxford and Cambridge's pedagogy is very effective at producing independently-minded, creative, and somewhat fearless students, who "get" the subject matter.
And there is quite a lot of research elsewhere supporting the effectiveness of small group tutoring (which might go a long way to explaining why the Oxbridge teaching style works as well as it does there).
So when you say that in his first semester, he gave a great deal of independence to the TAs, especially in small-group discussions, and gave students freedom for all the mid-term testing to be just formative if they wish, that sounds to me as if perhaps he was experimenting with bringing some of what he valued about Oxford's teaching practice to Berkeley.
Do you know if other Math 1A sections have more/less difficult exams?
sounds nearly mathematically utopian
i once was failed in an intro to logic course at an undergraduate university
i spent the class time working on my own projects, and sitting under trees
when the final came it was maybe the third time i attended the class
i got an A on the final, but when i received my final grade i found that attendance was monitored by daily quizzes that accounted for 40% of my grade
was the class intended to evaluate my understanding of truth tables or to determine how i spent an hour of my day three days a week?
because i thought the final more than confirmed the former
I know the system is different in the US, you start university earlier I think? Are the students taking this class 17-18 yrs?
I'm curious to know more about what your syllabus and exam is like, are there past papers online? Here is the maths exam[0] I took when I was about 17 (it's been a while) http://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/Images/249523-question... By the way, I doubt I could answer any of the questions now...
For what it's worth, memorizing proofs is a lot more than I was expected to do when I took Calculus I. You have to remember that in the modern age Calculus I is a very basic class. I'd expect it to be considered borderline remedial at a place like Berkeley. It wasn't even offered at all at the college I went to from what I remember.
At the very least, Coward does not deserve them.
Scott Shenker, a CS Prof actually has an unrelated campaign right now where he'll match his student donations 10:1, so a few friends and I have been discussing some rules lately.
> you instructed me to show a draft of my final to another very eminent member of faculty and former winner of the distinguished teaching award. His comment on a draft that contained 8 questions was that it was already too long and too hard, and should be no longer. I had originally been planning on asking 15 or so questions, including some difficult ones, but I was not allowed to do so. In the end we settled on 12 questions. The result of this intervention by you and other faculty was that the median score was over 90%, and in order to keep to departmental grade distributions I had to set the A- cutoff at 93%
The implication here seems to be that his final exam was notably harder than is typical and yet he was forced to throttle the cutoff for an A- to enforce regulated grade distributions (which in and of itself is a horrendous policy).
The letter is here:
http://alexandercoward.com/OpenLetter.pdf
I think it's hard to ignore this in combination with the highest teaching scores anyone in the department has received in apparently 18 years.
The skillset required to really get through to kids like that is entirely divorced from teaching more advanced classes or research: it's half nannying and half high-school football coach with a splash of the subject material.
And every department hires almost entirely based on research they have to more and more as budgets are slashed since research is their only opportunity to bring in more funding.
Of course, the CS department is in a different college (Engineering), has a different culture and, probably, way more funding than the math or physics departments, so there's plenty of reasons for it to be different.
Berkeley Mathematics Department: ".. I hope and expect that you will be able to align more with our standards for the remainder of this semester and during the next academic year."
Translation: Your students are doing significiently better than ours and therefore showing up our mediocre teaching performance and for that reason - you're fired ..
http://alexandercoward.com/BlowingTheWhistleOnUCBerkeleyMath...
If you were a lecturer at a research-focused institution, in which the quality of your teaching is a minor factor in your "success", and the social norm is mediocre teaching, would you teach at a high level?
Also, maybe the goal is to change the expectation that research universities lack good teachers? Public colleges educate many times more students than private ones, let alone small liberal arts schools.
Sometimes I ask the question, "What would I want if I were God of Everything?"
It makes sense to have elite universities, where the people who society will shove millions of dollars in grant money all go to get educated. And if I were God of Everything, I'd want them taught by excellent, dedicated educators. Right?
1) The knock-on effect of having this cross-published on HN and reddit will somehow make this story reach some form of news-media -> which in turn will influence UC Berkeleys decision, as they will be under the media-spotlight.
2) I always thought many STEM professors were useless educators who only taught students as a by-the-way while they chased fame/recognition among their peers for academic-success (or status). I guess this rings true for Math departments in many parts of the world.
As many others are saying, it would be better for this guy to leave, because if the department was overtly toxic before, the true assholism will shine once the other profs create a siege mentality against this guy for "outing them".
Well, you forgot Research Dollars. It's an open secret that STEM undergraduate education is seen as a departmental obligation, and that your goals, and what you were hired to do is produce new research. Best case scenario you use classes to filter and train people to perform your wage slave researcher staff. Realistically, STEM is moving towards a Lecturer / Researcher model, though faculty unions, senates, and ethics panels have opinions on the matter.
In contrast, instead of research dollars subsidizing undergraduate education, math departments generally are set up to use education to subsidize research. Fortunately mathematician's needs are typically quite modest. But when cheaper Lecturers are introduced to the department, it's clear that the department could be cut.
> As many others are saying, it would be better for this guy to leave, because if the department was overtly toxic before, the true assholism will shine once the other profs create a siege mentality against this guy for "outing them".
Realistically, it sounds like they're already in siege mentality. The picture he paints is that hiring an adjunct was controversial within the department because it represents a shift away from research, especially if he can improve on outcomes despite larger class size. Several tenure track faculty lines could feasibly be cut as a result of decreased need for teaching.
His best case scenario would have been for the information in that open letter to reach the hands of the people in power pushing for more Lecturers (and less tenure track faculty lines), before he was fired.
The research has to be done somewhere. It's supposed to be subsidized by the public or private donations but funding is regularly and methodically cut so the only remaining reliable source of income is tuition which ends up having to pay for both.
Not an ideal situation but unless Americans start deciding research is worth paying money for (unlikely) it's what we have.
The one place I've seen professors have real impact is in their ability to both answer innovative and novel questions and convey a sense of excitement and interest in a subject. While these only affect a small fraction of any given class they are the important value add and they are what someone who is personally passionate about the field and deeply knowledgeable about it brings to the table.
Worse, what seems like "good teaching" can often reflect a counterproductive attitude to the subject.
Everyone I know who has become a mathematician has done so DESPITE (not because) of their pre-college teachers (some have had the good fortune to run into one or two exceptions but still struggled past teachers who attempted to ruin the subject). These teachers were chosen entirely for their teaching ability but to no avail since without the perspective of a research career they weren't teaching people how to duplicate a computer algebra system instead of understanding the math. Focusing on accurate symbol manipulation and memorization is in active tension with understanding but is an easier rote to solving the kind of problems you can ask on AP tests.
College students are big boys and girls. They can read the damn textbook if needed. I spent an entire semester at caltech (my most productive one) without attending a single class (I had my friends turn in my homework in section). However, having professors available who could accurately convey (through course content, discussion and even research projects) what a discipline was about was invaluable.
Let's give up the charade people and let professors play videos of better speakers in lecture but lend their expertise to answering questions and talking to students.
My favorite part is where he imagines the Math department is "jolly cross".
Politically, this was an excellent play - with his popularity among students, the Math department (and in particular, named faculty) will have a really tough time getting students in their classes.
I don't know the full story and obviously his perspective is biased, but all the same, I pity the fool who has to battle his wits.
I have a mathematics degree, and I can say that most mathematicians I have known consider the math needed for most physics and engineering undergraduate degrees to be deadly boring. It's a rare math professor who enjoys teaching calculus year after year.
My university did not have this budget-grabbing approach from the theoretical math department; I think I can understand both the appeal of it, and the perils from the perspective of the department. 20 years after the choice is made to grab budget with large freshman calculus seminars, it makes sense to me you'd have a bunch of bad behavior and culture embedded.
The above is a very important point and deserves attention in its own right. What it means is that because the requirements for graduation in a particular liberal arts major include several math courses, this gets the math department lots of headcount which translates to budget.
The key lesson for students is to try to avoid those "cattle car" classes with tons of students competing to meet a requirement that they are not interested in learning about.
[0] - http://articles.latimes.com/1993-05-02/magazine/tm-30007_1_j...
From what I can see, he's a talented lecturer. He's articulate, genuinely interested in his students' understanding, and has some uninhibited dramatic enthusiasm that keeps the audience engaged.
He's doing a start-up centred on teaching skills for lecturers/professors; I wonder if behind the scenes the issue is simply about that?
Not sure how this particular argument will play out (yikes, it's quite public now though) but he's a smart chap and should land on his feet.
The brass professors at UC Berkeley seemed to be catty like that in all departments. They didn't like it when some young gun became more popular than them for teaching the same topics that they'd been teaching for a generation. Which makes sense, popular professor sell things and get rich, and they way they saw it, they weren't going to lose to some young upstart.
Alexander, if your students are giving you a 6.4-6.5 out of 7, for calc 1a and 1b, you're a beast.
That's worth confirming with a lawyer. AFAIK most states require employers to let you copy your personnel file.
Keep in mind this is only one side of the story.
Also, if you are going to come out against Berkeley, Klein Perkins, or someone else equally powerful then please make sure you can easily prove every allegation. It's the best way to avoid defamation lawsuits.
My lawyer said "It's not slander if it's true." ;)
Incidentally, some of the worst instructors I've had were these. It doesn't inspire much conference when you see one whose teaching involves verbatim copying from the textbook onto the blackboard and making serious errors on the parts where he/she doesn't. The impression I get from those is basically "if you can't even figure out clearly what you're doing, what makes you think you can teach us about it?" The best tended to be ones who didn't ever use a textbook at all.
Coward is such an ironic name for him, as from this article he is anything but a coward. I think he should find a better place to work where his skills are far more appreciated. That's what I did when I encountered a similar situation in computer science.
http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2014-...
Not everyone who claims to be a misunderstood and persecuted genius actually is one. There are people who are brilliant in some areas, but unwilling to accommodate being part of a larger group and difficult to work with. In programming terms, imagine an extraordinary programmer who's unwilling to use the organization's standard programming language or version control. I'm not sure that the Berkeley math department is really any different in preferring a pretty good in all areas to someone brilliant in some, but flawed in others, and, most importantly, unwilling to change.
At first, I wondered why he was blowing up the whole issue and whether it would actually help. If part of the issue is in the level of preparation for science classes, then the administration is going to be just as unfavorable as the department. Then I noticed that he's started some kind of teaching-related company. So, the department told him to change or be fired and he decided he'd rather do the latter, but as long as he's going out, he might as well try to get some publicity for his company.
All the comments about Berkeley not caring about undergraduate math education are far from reality. Sure there are a number of professors who don't take teaching seriously. But there are a large number of them who do, and are very good at it. Among them are Ogus, Hald, Christ, Evans, and Rezakhanlou, all named by AC as people having to do with his dismissal.
Just sent him an email and cc'ed my prof. His address it linked from the root domain:
"Alex, I just read your letter "BLOWING THE WHISTLE ON THE UC BERKELEY MATHEMATICS DEPARTMENT" <http://alexandercoward.com/BlowingTheWhistleOnUCBerkeleyMath... linked to from Hacker News <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10372181>.
While I've never attended UC Berkeley, nor have we met, I was moved by your letter. It reminded me of one of my favorite professors in college, who was also "a full-time lecturer," as opposed to a professor that split time between research and teaching. The quality of teaching from a professor dedicated entirely on the pursuit of education is unsurpassed. This professor was well known/beloved and also had classes that would fill up quickly. Not sure if there was statistically significant evidence in this case, but wouldn't be surprised at a strong positive correlation between prior students and subsequent class performance.
Anyways, without hearing from the other side of the lecture, what happened to you sounds like some shit. Best of luck in your next pursuit. Good people like you shouldn't have to put up with nonsense bureaucracy like that."
He probably doesn't expect to keep working there. However, the department can't quietly give him bad references to torpedo his attempts to get a job elsewhere.
His capability is now acknowledged and in the public record such that they can't deny it.
So, he now doesn't have to explain the lack of a reference when he applies for a new job. Fairly smart maneuver actually.
for most employment stuff you go through the company's internal grievance procedures first (and if those procedures are inadequate it helps you) before going to courts.
although if he was going to take this to court I'm surprised he created the webpage.
>He went off on so many tangents, nitpicked on random things and when it came down to it, taught the material rather poorly. I took his class with prior calculus knowledge so it was alright but for those that never had calc, it would've been so awful.
>Tries to teach math in a confusing essay format, and marks you down when you don't use his method correctly. Extremely arrogant and set on proving how his principles in teaching are the best. Class was very disorganized and grading until the very end of the course. Avoid taking a class with him if possible.
>Doesn't give homework, doesn't have a syllabus. Exams are a bunch of meaningless boring calculations. He's a genius but not a good teacher.
>He is a nice person, but not a good teacher. Instead of math, he spends most of the lecture telling you how to be a good person: he starts with telling you 'not to give up', and then discusses a mathematical problem(which is not tough) and gets stuck. For the rest the lecture, he will actually show you what 'not to give up' means.
There are also many positive reviews in there (more than negative ones), but they often focus on his charisma and dedication:
>Coward is an inspiration- he deeply cares about his students' learning and believes that you must be infatuated with your education. He really cares for his students and always asks the class if he's being clear.
> I have never had a Math professor who I truly admire - he changed that. The level of interest he takes in the class is unmatched and he really wants his students to do well. Rebellious, fun, helpful and unimaginably intellectual. Best class at Cal so far.
I was really impressed! He started with logic notation to explain the definition of a limit, which IMO is actually really important... do most lecturers cover this in an introduction to calculus?
I've heard a lot people complain on this forum that he didn't cover the material in the way that the math faculty liked. But this doesn't dumb down the material, this explains it in more detail!
Maybe I'm wrong though, maybe this is covered, but I don't seem to re all it in any calculus book I've seen. He was also very open about the text-book industry practice of making minor changes between editions just to sell new books. Maybe he fell afoul of them there as well.
Having a Lecturer teach twice the number of students for
half the money and do a fabulous job demolishes that
argument, and that is why so many people conspired to make
it not so, to mischaracterize my teaching, and do
everything in their power to remove me.Heartbreaking as it is, that describes most large organizations, and most small ones too. If you work at a place where the leadership supports you and truly wants you to do a good job, where the best people get promoted regardless of whether they're "playing the game" then you have found a rare place indeed!
I think that our education system was trying to teach me this all along, and I failed to learn it until I was in my 40s.
I got a middling grade (B+), but the experience was so bad it was the last math class I took. It took me seven years to fully realize my mistake and get back to working in line with my passions.
Anecdata I know, but at least one case where bad Cal math instruction derailed a trajectory.
having people go "unconventional" as they say.
might work but it also might backfire. Its like being on the bleeding edge.You might bleed.
I think the fast food analogy plays on the fact that every burger should be equal quality.
Innovation comes at a cost in education, you are playing with lives.
"Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."
1. Persuade Dr. Coward to teach at a community college, where his strong teaching abilities can enable a broad crew of would-be nurses, schoolteachers, etc., to succeed.
2. Compel, by petition and other means, the Cal administration to grant credit for CoCo science and math college courses taught by persons with more than four years' faculty experience in Ph.D.-granting accredited institutions.
Having said that, I am going to adopt a somewhat contrarian viewpoint. The math department fired Coward for deliberately and repeatedly subverting their requests to conform to departmental standards [1]. It is not surprising that behaving in a fashion that continuously pissed off senior faculty (with the power to fire or initiate the process of firing) got Coward fired.
Coward's student ratings were consistently high. Based on anecdotes, he sounds like an instructor I would love to have (he spontaneously derived a formula!).
However, this does not matter because Coward refused to participate in the system. What I term 'the system' is the set of departmental norms and standards that exist as they do for very good reasons. These reasons might not be understood by all actors.
My understanding of the state of the system is informed by the following: UCB is an institution that trains thousands of students in mathematics annually. They have a large faculty [2]. The numbers of people involved imply that there is tremendous variation amongst students and instructors - in areas such as raw aptitude, experience, language proficiency and motivation. The benefits of systematizing the process of training in a university of Berkeley's size are manifold. The system has to exist the way it does in order to produce large numbers of adequately (and usually only adequately) educated people. The purpose of disallowing faculty from deviating from such standards is to allow the system to function independently of the people involved in it. There are many disadvantages to this approach, such as stifling lecturer creativity and disabling course-level optimisations (like a particular professor's vivid geometric intuition for something abstract).
I could enumerate the reasons the system exists as it does (at length) but do not have space here, so here is one example: Using a standard textbook means that course content is instructor invariant. This makes the level of training robust to shitty lecturers, who necessarily exist in any sufficiently large system. It gives students recourse to a standard reference they know is correct. It decreases the variation in quality of students. This is particularly important for co-requirements. It is a huge problem when course B depends on course A and students do not have a firm grip on course A. This happened to my class: we arrived in applied mathematics 3 with a totally broken knowledge of multivariable calculus.
Essentially, the system exists as it does to provide a lower bound for the quality of training. Some people will be incompatible with it. UCB should probably have been more gentle in their handling of Coward - he was 'suicidally depressed' - but I say this with the benefit of hindsight.
[1] >> On September 22nd, 2013 he wrote in an email "But I do think it that it [sic] is very important that you not deviate too far from the department norms." On November 12th, 2014 he wrote "I hope that, on the basis of our conversation, you can further adjust to the norms of our department."
[2] https://math.berkeley.edu/people/faculty
[3] One might think that mathematics is mathematics, and any reference material on a topic will do. I can tell you from experience that this is false. A complex analysis novitiate trying to sort out what 'holomorphic', 'analytic' and 'complex differentiable' all mean will inevitably run into equivalent but different definitions.
Even though he quotes from the letter from the math department disturbingly selectively I think he gives away what is really going on in that quote:
"They also reveal some significant differences between your practices and what has been typical in our department [...] I hope and expect that you will be able to align more with our standards for the remainder of this semester and during the next academic year."
Surprise surprise, the students like the guy who doesn't make them learn (those in 16A/B aren't continuing on in a technical field but only take the course to satisfy requirements and/or because their counselors stress the importance of having math on your transcript).
If this isn't suggestive enough consider his statistics: his classes have 400+ students enrolled but the supposedly equivalent class taught by a faculty member only has 100. If he isn't cherry picking an 8am lecture (in which case we should be even more distrustful) this difference is so drastic as to be extremely suspicious. My experience TAing these very courses was that students were quite willing to put up with a bad lecturer (or poor TA in my case) to have a nicer schedule (leave earlier, avoid trudging back and forth etc..) but they were very cogniscent of even minor differences in supposed ease of grading and subject matter.
Besides, anyone who rights an open letter like this while supposedly appealing a deciscion is an ass who would be a nightmare to work with. Even if you (unwisely) believe he was unjustly terminated delibrately impugning the motives and integrity of the people he supposedly wishes to remain colleagues with is just a super asshole move.
I've met great teachers who were very dedicated to improving mathematics education. Every one of them avoided self-aggrandizement and did their best to share their approaches and experience with other educators. The mathematics department at UC Berkeley would be ecstatic if someone figured out how to teach intro calc content in a way that invigorated the students. Hell, it's almost a holy grail their as generation after generation of grad students (and professors) burn themselves out against students whose experiences in highschool have created an instinctive dislike of mathematics and the unshakable belief that math is about formulas and procedures (meaning they instinctively panic if a problem requires creativity...which is sadly what makes math interesting and fun).
---
Look, I have big issues with the way UC Berkeley (and most other universities) teach intro calculus courses. It's the 21st century and no one is served by forcing uninterested students to learn computational techniques by rote any computer mathematics system can easily accomplish. Either you are going to go into a technical discipline where having a conceptually grasp of integrals matters or you can just blindly plug them into a computer.
So give up making students memorize the various tests for series convergence, tricks for integrating etc.. Hell give up teaching computations at all in 16A/B. Slow it way the hell down and just do basic qualitative reasoning about functions, derivatives and integrals, e.g., focus on things like if we know the derivative is positive here what does that tell us about the function.
However, that choice to abandon the established curriculum is rightly something that needs to be handled by the department as a whole. Indeed, I suspect it would have long since been adopted if other courses (like intro econ...yet again not really for econ majors) didn't assume students had these tools. Changing the math curriculum in this way would first require other subjects change theirs...something that won't go over well and would take time.
His students go on to do other courses. Those students do better in those courses than the students of his colleagues. Do you disagree with that?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/science/astronomer-apologi...
Very gross.
I'm not necessarily inclined to take this guy's side of the dispute just because I read it first.
"Given the success I am having with students, one might think that the Mathematics Department leadership would be expressing curiosity about how I am achieving that success. Instead, Craig Evans [the interim chair of the department] in early 2014 asked me 'If you had a job at McDonalds and came along with all these new ideas, how long do you think you'd carry on working there?' The fact that the now Interim Chair of the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department should compare undergraduate education to fast food reveals everything you need to know about how students are regarded by the leading clique of men at the helm of the Mathematics Department of the number one public university in the world."
Should faculty be punished for having new ideas about teaching (which happen to be successful[1], and well-liked by students)?
[1] "My Fall 2013 Math 1A students were tracked into the next course in the sequence, Math 1B, and it was found that their average grade in Math 1B was 0.17 grade points higher than that of those students who took Math 1A with another instructor."
People would actively welcome new approaches to teaching math. It's fucking frustrating not getting through to your students or having them dislike the course. Most of the faculty has tenure and the focus is largely (but not entirely) on research. THE IDEA THAT PEOPLE ARE THREATENED BY HIS SUCCESS IS ABSURD.
He is succeeding in the truly obvious way. Lowering standards and making it easy for students to ace his class without the skills the university has deemed necessary.
If he was really so deeply gifted at teaching he could have just used the same final exam as another faculty member and taught his students that material. Why doesn't he?
Some things stand out from a quick skim of the personnel file/included complaint. Among these: he did not practically assign homework or have regular quizzes. This was noted as not being consistent with department norms. It actually _is_ of value to have consistency between multiple sections of introductory classes and as preparation for follow on classes in the same sequences (e.g Calc 1, 2 3 having similar structures in class organization) he seems to have disagreed philosophically with his boss (department chair) on this front. There are some other parts of the files posted that suggest he apparently did not work well with his graduate student instructors (teaching assistants). In my mind those are big enough reasons to let someone go.
He might be a great instructor. It might be a huge mistake for them to let him go, but it certainly doesn't seem like the only available explanations are completely specious or wrongly-motivated reasons. Also missing from submitted link is some info in the complaint that this was attempted to be worked out with a new incoming department chair, as evidenced by this being posted it seems like that didn't work out.
Apparently, learning the material better is more important to future success than consistency: the students in his classes did better in the following classes by .17 grade points than students from other (presumably more consistent) classes.
That's a very strong statement for a mathematician to make. I wonder how he can prove that 1 million people "read" it.
The fact that a lecturer with low standards happens to be popular with students is irrelevant. The math department has a large presence on campus because it is the best in the world. My advisor was Robin Hartshorne, and I took advantage of courses with a Fields medalist. That sort of department has standards that it enforces because it demands quality, not coddling.
This is all underlined by the fact that the lecturer in question states he has a breakdown of some sort due to the stress of the position. We're to take this seriously? I feel for the man, but it clearly indicates that the criticisms might be divorced from reality.
If you're too weak to excel in an environment filled with the world's top researchers, and where you are responsible for your own achievement, then find another school where they let prop comics teach math and spoon feed you.
Where is your sense of wonder, or your desire to know these exceptional people while observing how they think? How myopic. If you're at Berkeley, you're wasting your time being bitter and hopefully you'll transfer. That isn't a personal criticism, so much as recognizing that a top research university isn't for everyone, and the unique resources and access it provides should be given great weight or you shouldn't be using them.
Professor Ogus cared, as did almost all of my professors. I was amazed I could take classes and spend time with people who are shaping our understanding of mathematics. It's the same shock you have when you go to the SFMoMA and realize that some of the greatest post-Impressionist works in the world are sitting entirely unprotected in front of you. It impacted me, it impacted the way I think, and I will always value what they did for me. An adjunct simply can't provide that experience, and if you're just looking to pass Math 1A go to a community college for those credits. If you want to make a mark and know some of the brightest minds of our age, go to Berkeley.
And I'd think that it would be way more interesting if a Fields medalist would be freed up to teach more courses about his/her specialty instead of the intro to calculus stuff (or arguably not teach at all but I disagree with that position).
The reality is that top math departments are very competitive places. It's realistic, not cruel. And feelings, yours or mine, aren't the ultimate arbiter of truth.
I, for example, am a weak football player. It's okay to say you're weak on certain dimensions, and it's in fact very important to assess as impartially as our limbic system allows because it prevents you from wasting time.
I wouldn't break down trying to run the football field with Gronkowski because there were some elbows thrown. I don't feel entitled to be a football player. I'd recognize the nature of the game I'm playing and find another one better suited to my skills. I also wouldn't try to turn football into a different game.
Suggesting a student go to a liberal arts college focused on teaching rather than a major research university isn't "cruel and horribly antisocial". It's allocating scarce resources effectively.
Holy shit, are you a robot? Are you really just going to trivialize his depression? Just think about the kind of person you are for a second. To me, you have absolutely no credibility if you can't conjure up an ounce of sympathy for the guy.
But I guess that lines up with the fact that you support the Mathematics department here. Having gone to Berkeley and experienced the mediocrity of STEM education there, I have no idea how you can be on their side.
It is not enough for a team member to be fantastic in a solo role. I'd be more interested in hearing from other faculty than I would from the students, who don't much experience actually working with Coward.
And in any case, if someone on a dev team got significantly better numbers by bucking the trends, I would be obligated to try and understand their methods and help them gain greater acceptance. It doesn't make sense to remove someone who gets results. It makes sense to integrate them.
Did that turn out bad for the team? Not really. Life goes on. And sometimes its just a good learning experience for both parties.
I taught math as an adjunct at a Big Ten university with a prestigious math department several years ago. I never once met with any member of the faculty, even my supervisor, and nobody ever observed my teaching. All of the sections of the course that I taught had the same syllabus and exams. I had students from other sections sitting in on my lectures.
As for hearing from faculty, oddly enough I was on the other side of the issue as well, since I also taught the 3rd year "weeder" course in electrical engineering. My students were woefully unprepared in math despite N semesters of calculus in the math department. Once during a break in the activity, I asked my engineering students how the university could improve engineering education. Their consensus: Better math teaching.
Yes, there could still be confounding factors. He is seen as an enjoyable lecturer, and students who care about their classes enough to select the better lecturer might be better students. But still.
If you want to continue the analogy to software engineering, the modules he's producing are students, and they are meeting their specifications (later performance) quite well.
The closer comparison would be a Big 4 accounting partner (or law firm partner) that bring in revenue, is well loved by his clients. You know what would happen if the firm fires them? The clients leave with the partner. Luckily for Berkeley their clients can't leave nilly wily here.
Edit: On second reading, this was mentioned: "Further, the current Interim Chair, Craig Evans, explained that I am causing problems because students are not signing up for other Professors' classes on account of me. This is to be observed this semester, Fall 2015."
Yeah, if this was some consulting professional firm, the firm would be in big trouble already.
Perhaps it's the other professors who are causing the problem by not putting any effort into teaching well?
Mathematics is actually fascinating, but teaching and listening to math lectures is generally not interesting at all. Anyone who can teach it and keep Students interested and have them understand the material is a gem and should be kept at all costs!
"My Fall 2013 Math 1A students were tracked into the next course in the sequence, Math 1B, and it was found that their average grade in Math 1B was 0.17 grade points higher than that of those students who took Math 1A with another instructor."
0.17. Not even a whole point.
Student evaluations don't really count since those are highly subjective. Students tend to hastily mark whatever they want on them because they want to get the evaluations over with as soon as possible. If a professor is somewhat amicable and invests a moderate level of effort into his/her teaching, then it's not hard to score at least a 6 on average on these evaluations (as students would mark either 6 or 7 in such a case).
Anyway, his performance as a lecturer is irrelevant to his argument. There are three criteria that junior faculty are assessed against in order to become tenured at UC Berkeley (or, otherwise, dismissed): teaching quality, reputation and research. Funny how he left out the last bit. He hasn't published anything since 2013.
And the university is probably firing him to hire another professor at a cheaper salary in order to save money, contrary to his belief that the university is firing him because of disagreements with his teaching philosophy. Universities tend to do this to professors who don't have much research potential and don't teach specialized, upper division courses. The UC system is crippled financially, so departments are more inclined to carry out dismissals of non-tenured professors who don't publish much and who solely teach lower division courses. Non-tenured professors can be fired at will. That's just another day in the life of academia.
The part about the micro-managing harasser and treatment of women, staff and lecturers is definitely worrisome, though. But we need to be careful about believing in these implications absolutely because of Coward's state of mind at the moment. He has already blown the quality of his teaching out of proportion.
The post suggests that he's "full-time lecturer". The grievance says that his job title is "Lecturer". Why would that require him to publish research?
There are professors whose teaching quality is actually proficient and sometimes excellent, but whose student evaluations are marred by the fact that they can't speak English well, they have social deficiencies (e.g. Asperger's syndrome), etc. Student evaluations are flawed in the same way intelligence tests are flawed; student evaluations favor professors who speak and communicate most closely to the popular consciousness of students at the time in the same way intelligence tests are biased against non-native test-takers (some questions posed on intelligence tests may use culturally native objects).
In regards to your points about research, maybe the math department should consider establishing a "teaching professor" role like the EECS department has done. Most of the lower division introductory CS courses are taught by teaching professors like Paul Hilfinger, John Denero, Dan Garcia, and Josh Hug. Given that math is so important to a variety of majors on campus, why shouldn't we demand that large, lower division math courses be taught by people who are experts in teaching?
Most universities, particularly public ones, will engage in the practice of recycling lower-division teaching faculty every so often in order to avoid the wage jump from non-tenure status to tenure status.
Yeah, established teaching positions are a thing in other industrialized countries like Canada. The public higher-education system in the state of California has many flaws, and the absence of established teaching positions is one of them ... because the system is financially crippled.
And that's the point I'm trying to make here. Coward should not be mad at UC Berkeley's Math Department. He thinks the buck starts and stops with the Math Department. The department is the way it is because of the greater UC system's financial insolvency molded by factors out of the control of UC Berkeley's Math Department and UC Berkeley as a whole. The UC system sucks because of inappropriate state economic policies over the past decade or so that include egregious spending on unnecessary things.