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0 pointsstale20028y ago0 comments

Researchers are extremely unqualified to be teachers. That's because researchers are good at researching.

And this skill has very little overlap with teaching undergraduate students.

And on the other end, a fairly small percentage of students end up doing any research in college.

In an ideal world, researchers would research, and people who specialize in teaching would teach.

You do NOT have to be some cutting edge leader in your field to teach undergrads. Simple skills, like being an engaged and interesting speaking are way way way more important than how many papers you've published.

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newen8y ago

In my opinion and experience, the process of teaching itself makes you a much better researcher. People can get bored doing research, epecially if it is primarily solo research. Plus, teaching forces you to learn a subject much more thoroughly than you would otherwise. And if you want to expand your research to a slightly different topic, teaching that topic can give you a lot of knowledge and confidence in that topic. I feel like teaching+research institutions do better research than pure research institutions.

Fomite8y ago

One of my best teachers was a hard core researcher.

Some of my worst teachers were teaching specialists.

And the most influential person in my undergraduate career? A researcher.

stale2002OP8y ago

There are always exceptions, of course.

My point is the research and teaching are orthogonal skills.

It is certainly possible for someone to be both a good researcher and a good teacher.

I am just saying that I don't care how good of a researcher they are. The only thing I care about is how good of a teacher they are.

So let's judge the teachers based SOLELY on their teaching skills, and not have writing papers have anything at all to do with whether they are hired as a teacher.

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