8 ms·

Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

• hugh4 11y ago
  I'm not sure if "complaining about getting fired" counts as "whistleblowing". I'm not necessarily inclined to take this guy's side of the dispute just because I read it first.
  • greenyoda 11y ago
    I think this goes far beyond complaining about getting fired, and delves into the pernicious attitudes of the department's faculty. For example: "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."
    • TruePath 11y ago
      Should departments have standards they expect their lecturers to enforce? 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?
      • YokoZar 11y ago
        I'm not sure you read the article correctly. He was asked to make his tests easier, and his students performed better in subsequent classes taught by different professors.
  • 994125010 11y ago
    I would like to see the Department's response too. Hopefully, they reply with their reasons rather than attack the argument that Coward has written here.
    • lockes5hadow 11y ago
      For legal reasons I doubt they can reply at all.
      • mr_turtle 11y ago
        As a former CAL student, I am saddened to read about this. I didn't have to take Math 1A or any math course for that matter, but I did have to take an AC course per University requirements. I wasn't looking forward to it. I ended up taking the Southern Border with Professor Shaiken. That was by far one of the most educational and interesting courses I had taken at CAL. I too would like to see the University's side, but I am inclined to believe they can't respond for legal reasons, and if they could their response would be far more vanilla then Prof. Coward's side.
  • probdist 11y ago
    Indeed. It actually puts UC Berkeley in a pretty horrible position by going public like this. It does not look good for employers to have the same kind of public litany of complaints against an employee. 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.
    • greenyoda 11y ago
      "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)" 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.
• mvanveen 11y ago
  I had the pleasure of taking Differential Equations from Dr. Coward at UC Davis back in undergrad. He was one of the best math professors I ever had.
• wildboarcharlie 11y ago
  As a UC Berkeley student who's never taken one of Coward's classes, I've heard great things from every single friend of mine whose taken his class ("I love Coward" is heard a lot). I know students are already rallying to keep him at Cal. However, I think that perhaps the Math Department at Cal doesn't deserve such a great professor if the system is as decrepit as described.
  • archgoon 11y ago
    > I think that perhaps the Math Department at Cal doesn't deserve such a great professor if the system is as decrepit as described. At the very least, Coward does not deserve them.
    • crimsonalucard 11y ago
      Coward is the Math department. Calling the administrators members of said math department is a disservice to all of education.
• zetrox 11y ago
  #WithCowardWeStand
• zetrox 11y ago
  #WithCowardWeStand
• ngoldbaum 11y ago
  More rotten news from Berkeley. Just this week, it was revealed that the university administration decided a warning was sufficient punishment after a Title IX investigation revealed Prof. Geoff Marcy participated in a decade of abusive and harassing behavior. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/science/astronomer-apologizes-for-behavior.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/science/astronomer-apologi...
  • comrh 11y ago
    > In June, the university concluded that Dr. Marcy had engaged in inappropriate behavior with students, including groping them, kissing them and touching or massaging them. Very gross.
• stonogo 11y ago
  Keep in mind how you would handle this situation if you managed a large and well-established dev team with procedures and policies you worked hard on and are proud of. 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.
  • mckiddy 11y ago
    His entire job was teaching students, so I don't give a rat's ass about what the rest of the faculty thinks if the students like him and perform well.
    • jannotti 11y ago
      Right. I was skeptical in first few paragraphs, since students' teaching assessments do have their flaws. But if there was a statistically significant improvement in his students performance in later classes, then the man's doing his job. 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.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  • striking 11y ago
    A software dev team requires far more one-on-one interaction between "faculty members" than teaching does (where faculty are the ones producing the software and the students are the users). 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.
    • 11y ago
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• fernly 11y ago
  I'm a bit puzzled by the statement that he is asking "campus authorities" to "overrule" his firing. Why would he want to continue working there, or, how could he expect to be able to work in a department after indicting it in this fashion? With this document hasn't he pretty thoroughly burned his bridges?
  • dnautics 11y ago
    For the pleasure of teaching 400+ students a year who could all benefit from his instruction?
    • pg_is_a_butt 11y ago
      i'm sure the pleasure of taking federally insured loan money from 20,000,000 sheep isn't worth defending at all?
  • ablatner 11y ago
    Because the student body, even those who haven't had him as a lecturer, adore him. He may be burning bridges with others in the department, but he has an incredibly strong bridge with the rest of campus.
  • DanBC 11y ago
    it's part of the process for wrongful dismissal. 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.
  • bsder 11y ago
    > I'm a bit puzzled by the statement that he is asking "campus authorities" to "overrule" his firing. Why would he want to continue working there, or, how could he expect to be able to work in a department after indicting it in this fashion? With this document hasn't he pretty thoroughly burned his bridges? 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.
• anindyabd 11y ago
  Instead of teaching at a large research school which cares more about professors obtaining grants, he should teach at a small liberal-artsy school where the professors are expected to spend more of their time actually teaching students.
  • dwaxe 11y ago
    He'll have more students (and therefore more total impact) at a large public school. 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.
    • bpicolo 11y ago
      UC Berkeley IS a large, public school.
      • narsil 11y ago
        Seems like dwaxe knows that and was suggesting why the OP would prefer Berkeley over a smaller school.
  • syllogism 11y ago
    That's kind of sad though, isn't it? 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?
  • ldwcal 11y ago
    fwiw, there's a tenure track for lecturers at UCs
    • jnpatel 11y ago
      but as the post notes, it's underutilized in Berkeley's Mathematics Department > "We explained to you before you accepted the position that the idea of employing a full-time lecturer is controversial in our department."
• chris_wot 11y ago
  He should come back to Sydney!
• VanillaSwirl 11y ago
  .
• grandalf 11y ago
  > The Mathematics Department uses its privileged role in providing service teaching for undergraduates in all the sciences and social sciences to justify its size and all the trappings that go with that like funding and office space. 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.
• roflchoppa 11y ago
  As someone who is not going to berkley, but studying higher level math. Alexander, if your students are giving you a 6.4-6.5 out of 7, for calc 1a and 1b, you're a beast.
• vessenes 11y ago
  What a great and inspiring letter from someone who is clearly under significant public and private pressure; I'm sure he was repeatedly advised not to go public in any way by friends, enemies and lawyers on both sides. My favorite part is where he imagines the Math department is "jolly cross".
  • selimthegrim 11y ago
    No, he's saying the other departments (engineering and physical science) who are supposed to be "served" by the math dept. are "jolly cross" at the mathematicians for shirking their duties. This situation is by no means limited to Berkeley. UCSB did an excellent job but other universities I have worked at I have heard exactly the same complaints.
    • vessenes 11y ago
      My bad; I was just so into reading 'jolly cross' in his letter, I forgot just who was cross. 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.
  • ericjang 11y ago
    I agree. He really knows how to substantiate his grievances with choice words and data. I don't know any of the players involved in this drama but the letter was so damning that I could not help but look up profiles of Stark, Ogus, Christ, and Evans just to get a picture of their faces. 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.
• bobhaigler 11y ago
  I hope they can work it out. It would be a shame to lose someone who loves teaching and who students appreciate. My 1A prof at Cal said openly (and with a dash of humor) that he was being forced to lecture and would rather do his research but that he periodically had to teach a class. I wonder if that was the accepted culture in the department and Coward broke a bit against the status quo.
  • Simulacra 11y ago
    Mine too!!!! Harbir Lamba at George Mason University called us all spoiled brat's, and said he hated teaching, and would much rather be doing research. There was no humor in his voice whatsoever. He really hated being forced to teach.
• VanillaSwirl 11y ago
  Unpopular opinion, but I think he's being overly dramatic. "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.
  • ablatner 11y ago
    If you read the whole article you'll see that he's actually lower paid. One of the reasons the department doesn't like him is that he demonstrates that it's possible to teach more students better (even if just slightly) at a lower salary, and that scares them because they're so focused on increasing their budget.
  • cyrus_ 11y ago
    By my reading of the essay, he was hired as teaching faculty, so he is not being judged on his research or reputation within the research community.
• socrates2016 11y ago
  Have a Berkeley math degree. Two observations. Student ratings are whack. I had a professor I thought was really good but had an average rating. I had one fellow student state that he hated the professor. I am pretty sure the professor did nothing to him that deserved that hatred. People don't like it when they don't do as well as they expect. Second, it appears that the math department hires based on research because I had a newly minted professor who was just plain indecipherable.
  • analog31 11y ago
    Conventional wisdom among teachers is that ratings are mainly a function of the grades that students expect to receive in the course. I was in the room when two profs were discussing their grading policies, and one of them flat-out wanted to give easy grades because he was coming up on tenure.
    • nilkn 11y ago
      I found this snippet from an open letter he wrote to the Mathematics Department in the past: > 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 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.
      • crimsonalucard 11y ago
• Gatsky 11y ago
  Classic Sayre's Law: "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre's_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre's_law
  • greenyoda 11y ago
    Except that this isn't just petty political infighting among the faculty over office space and such. It affects students' educations, which are pretty high stakes (the main purpose of the university, some might even say).
    • xamuel 11y ago
      A skillful writer can make any job sound indispensable. Money is a better indicator than words when it comes to what society really values beneath all the soundbites.
      • nitrogen 11y ago
        Society doesn't always value economically what it needs existentially.
      • spenczar5 11y ago
        Money also flows freer from where it is more available, though. Your statement would imply that rich people's proclivities reflect general values, regardless of the source of their wealth, which doesn't seem right.
  • brianchu 11y ago
    I think the stakes are quite high. If he is truly a superior lecturer, at stake is the calculus education of over 800 students per year at one of the top schools in the nation, many of whom will be future scientists and engineers.
    • robwilliams 11y ago
      The stakes are perceived as low because it's not a life-or-death decision and nobody but math students at a single school care about it.
• laxatives 11y ago
  I graduated from Cal in 2013 in Physics and CS. I had a full time lecturer (not a professor) for a course in Analytic Mechanics and the teacher (Charman) was in a similar situation. Despite having ratings well above average and being immensely popular, he was let go. It seems like lecturers are treated as second class citizens, much like contract workers or outsourced positions.
  • joshAg 11y ago
    Lecturers are Cal's version of adjunt professors. Just like how GSIs are Cal's version of TAs.
    • tikhonj 11y ago
      That's definitely not true in the CS department, at the very least. Lecturers in the CS department can get "security of employment" which is tenure in everything but name and, while I was there, most of the intro courses and some advanced undergraduate courses were taught by lecturers like that. 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.
      • Animats 11y ago
        Now that may be the problem. Perhaps the mathematics department should be moved to Engineering. Stanford did that with computer science back in the 1980s. It used to be part of Arts and Sciences, run by a rotating committee, and was graduate-only. The education side was disorganized, with schedules and staffing not matching up with admissions. The entire department was transferred to Engineering, was better organized, and got much better on the educational side. The research side was dominated by logicians to and through the "AI Winter". Then they brought in machine learning people for the DARPA Grand Challenge, and that turned the research side around. Now the machine learning people are in charge, and most of the logicians and expert systems people have retired. Science progresses one funeral at a time.
      • 11y ago
• analog31 11y ago
  In addition there are further mischaracterizations of my teaching in my personnel file that I am prevented from sharing because the University claims it is their property. That's worth confirming with a lawyer. AFAIK most states require employers to let you copy your personnel file.
  • jleader 11y ago
    My guess would be that you're allowed to copy, but they probably don't want you to publicly share what you've copied. Whether that desire for you not to disclose is legally enforceable should be confirmed with a lawyer, of course.
• kelukelugames 11y ago
  I had Ogus at Berkeley! He still looks like a lemming. :) 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." ;)
• escherplex 11y ago
  Curious. Was it ever considered that this may be fallout from the decision to hold classes during the campus AFSCME strike back in late November 2013, justification outlined in an impassioned e-mail sent to students? see: http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2014-09-02/cal-lecturers-email-students-goes-viral-why-i-am-not http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2014-... and the collection of heated pro/con responses which followed. Absolutely bizarre. Reminds me of the dismissal of the physicist David Bohm from Princeton in early 1950s orchestrated by then president Harold Dodds, a rabid anticommunist with close ties to the McCarthy era State Department who viewed Bohm as a Marxist unionist. May be what goes around comes around. Does Chancellor Nicholas B. Dirks and a majority in the Math department happen to have close ties to Sacramento and AFSCME? If so the real rationale for proposed dismissal may be that the professor is deemed insufficiently Marxist unionist by the powers that be. Just glad I had the financial resources to eschew that institutional quagmire.
  • brianchu 11y ago
    Doubtful. I was a student during that time and I can't recall any math or CS (or STEM) classes that cancelled a class session because of the strike. The most that happened was some teaching assistants cancelled their section for one day.
    • escherplex 11y ago
      Started reading Peat's 'Infinite Potential - The Life and Times of David Bohm' yesterday and came across this post on HN. Knowing of the stir created by the 2013 e-mail, the possible parallels with events associated with Bohm's dismissal from Princeton (although for seemingly opposite political reasons) were striking. As an irrelevant aside, Bohm's 3-world intentionality/stochastic/objectified space hypothesis is interesting because it reduces the Schrödinger cat metaphor to a useful fiction.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• solveforall 11y ago
  If what he Dr. Coward says is true, and I have no reason to doubt him, this makes me sad as a Berkeley alum. I remember taking Math 53 with an awful professor who could barely speak English and refused to cover the material, asking us to just read the material ourselves and ask him questions. This professor had been there for many years despite repeatedly getting in trouble for failing too many students (that he neglected to teach). This is unfortunately the state of universities now, teaching is nothing, research is everything. Lecturers are treated like crap and barely scraping by. I wonder when the devaluation of teaching will catch up to us; maybe another country that values teachers will be able to attract more of the best students in the world.
  • tdaltonc 11y ago
    > teaching is nothing, research is everything 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.
    • lunarhowl 11y ago
      "Ignorance is Strength" "Who is John Galt?"
    • solveforall 11y ago
      I stand corrected :)
  • Natsu 11y ago
    I wish I knew some good fix to split up research and lecturing. The teaching should be done by people who are good at it and the research by people who are good at that. I suppose there might be some areas where there are just too few people qualified to teach something at the proper level, but I somehow doubt that's true at the undergraduate level. I remember distinctly which professors of mine were effective at conveying the material and an understanding of it vs. those who were not.
    • 11y ago
• hendzen 11y ago
  Not the only skeleton in the UC Berkeley Mathematics closet - see the story of Jenny Harrison [0] for another example. [0] - http://articles.latimes.com/1993-05-02/magazine/tm-30007_1_jenny-harrison http://articles.latimes.com/1993-05-02/magazine/tm-30007_1_j...
  • Simulacra 11y ago
    1993? I see the relevance, but I think that's a bit dated. Even a math department Berkeley has come a considerable amount of ways from 1993. Back then I think she still had gender working against her
  • archmikhail 11y ago
    I had her for a class a few years ago, and like Coward, she was an excellent teacher who didn't care for the norms of the department. She was actually working on a new textbook at the time which was all about teaching the fundamentals of mathematics in a completely different way to give a better foundation for higher level mathematics. At the time, she had just taken a small group of non-STEM majors, and using her book, got them to graduate level math in just 1.5 years. Sadly I haven't seen the book released, but one can only hope the work of these talented individuals will not be hindered by silly politics.
    • MaysonL 11y ago
      The one book I saw in her list of publications[0], Universal linear algebra for students of mathematics and physics, seems to be awaiting publication, supposedly from Birkhäuser (a division of Springer), although I was unable to locate any reference to it on their site (possibly because the site sucks). It seems to be currently used, in pdf form, as a text for a course or two. I'd love to get my hands on a copy. [0] https://math.berkeley.edu/~harrison/Publications.html https://math.berkeley.edu/~harrison/Publications.html
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    • JennyHarrison 11y ago
• tspino 11y ago
  If he's this good sounds like it would make sense to build him an online platform for offering his classes over the Internet to the world rather than letting him suffer in that toxic environment. Let's set him free!
• philip1209 11y ago
  I'm not associated with UC Berkeley, but I have been involved in a lot of campus politics in the past. Because I see many alumni commenting here about the effectiveness of this lecturer, I offer a suggestion: Give a restricted gift to the university. Earmark it for something like the salary or research of Dr. Coward. If they want to play politics, you can too and restrict that your donations are tied to his continued employment.
  • hugh4 11y ago
    If he's really that great, and if everything he says about the rest of the department is true, then he shouldn't have to work there. Give the money to Stanford or something.
    • PhasmaFelis 11y ago
      Why on earth would you advocate giving the administrators what they want and depriving Berkeley math students of their one exceptional professor--a professor that they clearly need more than better-supplied students elsewhere?
      • studentrob 11y ago
        Depends where the root of the problem lies. Does this story accurately reflect the environment? And if so, is it only this department's chair who's pushing out the innovative professors? Or is the university, at a higher level, pushing out innovative teachers? If the latter then I'd agree with the above, donate elsewhere: administrators are the ones making all the decisions. It's an uphill battle to change that. Giving them money in any form won't help solve this problem. There are plenty of other institutions to support. On the other hand, there's clearly more to this story, and the school and department should be given a chance to respond before we pass judgment.
  • crimsonalucard 11y ago
    Correcting injustice by inserting more politics doesn't solve the root of the problem.
• stormclad 11y ago
  This makes more sense why someone like Dan Goldston would leave Berkeley for San Jose State
• stormclad 11y ago
  This helps me understand why someone like Dan Goldston left UC Berkeley to teach at San Jose State.
• dustintran 11y ago
  Note that this should not validate or invalidate his claims, but here are videos of his teaching: http://math1afall2015.blogspot.com http://math1afall2015.blogspot.com
  • joeevans1000 11y ago
    Wow. He is a really engaging lecturer. I'm actually going to watch these videos to learn. I would have loved a professor like this.
• phantom_oracle 11y ago
  2 things about this fascinate me: 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".
  • jldugger 11y ago
    > 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). 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.
• userbinator 11y ago
  This question is one that I asked, and in response it was made very clear to me what is meant by the norms of the department. It means teach from the textbook. 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.
• squirrel 11y ago
  I was a grad student and teaching assistant in Berkeley maths 1998-99. I observed that the department intentionally admitted many more grad students than it could possibly put through the full PhD, and had a well-tuned system for weeding them out after a year or two - chiefly a "preliminary exam" that was notoriously tough and (in my view and that of many others) unfair. A charitable view would be that the department wanted to give many students a chance to shine and graduate, so had a liberal admissions policy; a cynic might observe that those who failed the prelim conveniently taught calculus as TAs for a couple of years for a ridiculously low cost, hence provided cheap labour (much cheaper than Dr. Coward for sure). After two years of experiencing the kind of environment Dr. Coward describes, I definitely adopted the cynical view. I left the university, and mathematics, and have been much happier as a result. I wish Dr. Coward every success in changing what I found to be a very unpleasant system in the department.
  • Bahamut 11y ago
    It should be noted that this is a fairly common pattern in graduate mathematics departments at public schools - IMO, it is to give students a chance when given outstanding resources. 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.
    • semi-extrinsic 11y ago
      This sounds like a very strange system to me. Where I graduated (and I believe in most of Europe) the university has to have allocated the full funding for the entire PhD for a student before that student is admitted. So the university cannot afford to run a scheme like you describe, which is good since that sounds to me like a borderline predatory system.
      • TruePath 11y ago
• ezmuller 11y ago
  I'll just be over here waiting on the other side of the story...
  • keyboardwarrior 11y ago
    The other side of the story is that they probably want a consistent approach to education, 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.
    • mianos 11y ago
      Surely gathering performance metrics and analysing them is the method of avoiding the backfire? Surveying downstream faculties and see how they like the results is another way to measure and move forward from a system of cronies with a low risk of degradation.
  • yojo 11y ago
    I have no dog in this fight, but his description lines up with my experience. I showed up at Cal in 2001 as a nerdy kid super-jazzed about math. I took Math 1A my first semester, and the lectures started with the professor turning his back to the class and proceeding to write proofs on the board for 90 minutes in indecipherable handwriting with little to no explanation. People would show up to class with pillows, no joke. 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.
    • chris_wot 11y ago
      I would love to have someone secretly record that lecture and put it on YouTube to shame the lecturer. I'm curious if someone has actually done this?
  • 11y ago
• berkmathstudent 11y ago
  I took his Math 1A class (1st semester of calculus) in Fall 2013, which was his first semester here. 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.
  • jacobolus 11y ago
    One of his letters suggests that folks at the math department insisted that he water the exam down and reduce the number of questions. Do you know if other Math 1A sections have more/less difficult exams?
    • psykovsky 11y ago
      I suspect he found those exams easy because of the quality teaching he got from the man...
      • MengerSponge 11y ago
        That was my guess too. Calculus is actually really simple, and any reasonable test is going to be easy if you were taught well.
  • rootlocus 11y ago
    "The midterms don't count if you don't want them to, which means 100% of your grade can be the final." And that's your choice. How is it his fault for giving you a choice? "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?
• Simulacra 11y ago
  I found at George Mason University that my best professors were lectures, adjunct, and those not on a tenure-track. I recall my first calculus professor loudly proclaiming his disdain for teaching. He told us explicitly that he would much rather be doing research, he hated teaching, but because he was tenured, there's absolutely nothing we could do about it. So we could deal with it or find another class. He was the reason I didn't pursue mathematics at George Mason University, because I sadly realized that most of the department had the same feelings.
• phillipwei 11y ago
  He was previously in the news for "crossing a picket line": http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2014-09-02/cal-lecturers-email-students-goes-viral-why-i-am-not http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2014-...
• esaym 11y ago
  Does this guy have any video lectures? I'd like to watch and check him out.
  • 8ig8 11y ago
    An earlier comment has a video link... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10372658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10372658
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• hackaflocka 11y ago
  "Here is an email I wrote to my students in the Fall of 2013 that went viral, and was read by more than 1 million people." That's a very strong statement for a mathematician to make. I wonder how he can prove that 1 million people "read" it.
• ndesaulniers 11y ago
  This reminded me of my favorite professor who was also "a full-time lecturer". 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/BlowingTheWhistleOnUCBerkeleyMathematics.html> http://alexandercoward.com/BlowingTheWhistleOnUCBerkeleyMath... linked to from Hacker News <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10372181> 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."
• principal0 11y ago
  This is ludicrous - I was taught by Professor Ogus, and he had an excellent grasp of didactic techniques. He dedicated a large amount of time to having me come in during office hours so I could do a mock lecture before it was actually delivered, and I could compare notes when he delivered his. Yes, he was exacting and demanding, but it made me a better student. 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.
  • chris_wot 11y ago
    I'm still learning mathematics. I'm in fact largely teaching myself. I can assure you, though, that a Fields medalist is not required to teach me Differential Calculus (Math1A). In fact, I'd prefer it if they didn't.
    • principal0 11y ago
      Likely you don't care because you have no intention of pursuing mathematics in a research capacity at any point. However part of the experience for those who care more about math than an easy "A" is ensuring you have access to amazing role models early on. People who take an interest in you, and spend some of their incredibly valuable time shepherding you through a unique, beautiful field. 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.
• ytinifx 11y ago
  I'm 100% on the side of Berkeley's math department here. In my opinion, the way AC has gone about things reflects upon his personality and why he is (probably) disliked by members of the math department. Read through what he calls his "evidence" to support his claims and you will see that there is more than enough reason to doubt his claims. 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.
  • caskance 11y ago
    Hald in particular is everything Coward wishes he could be. He does a great job of teaching undergrad calculus in a way that is engaging while still meeting expectations of other departments.
• raykaye47 11y ago
  I went to Cal and I took Math 1A and I agree that the professors there don't give a fuck about engaging and motivating you. Math 1A is a weeder class and is meant to discourage dumb people from the sciences and push them into easier majors like Communications or PoliSci, etc.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
• TruePath 11y ago
  Having actually taught (well TAed)in the UC Berkely math department I can say that generations of both graduate students (who have most of the contact with students) and professors have struggled to the best of their ability to teach calculus in an engaging and interesting way to their students. Now research talent and teaching talent don't always come together but there were plenty of dedicated and talented teachers. Dr. Coward is basically claiming that he is so amazingly talented (or that not one of the multitude of intro calc teachers over the years was competent) that he single handedly does the impossible and rises head and shoulders above all these other teachers. 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.
• ForkFed 11y ago
  Yet another anecdotal proof that the idea of elite universities is not practically useful. I studied math in Germany and the quality as well as the level of lectures is mostly quite awesome.
• kriro 11y ago
  I wonder if other universities are lining up to land him since he seems to be an excellent teacher. My guess is that it won't be the case since the problem is systemic. Hope I'm wrong, good luck to Mr. Coward.
  • ytinifx 11y ago
    More likely the opposite. Departments don't like people who generate this much drama for simply being let go. Why would anyone? This unfairly hurts Berkeley's reputation.
    • misingnoglic 11y ago
      Why is this unfair?
• daniel-levin 11y ago
  Coward has justifiable grievances with the UCB mathematics department. It must be extraordinarily depressing to work hard at exposition of lower division mathematics to a class of otherwise largely unmotivated students, only to be fired for doing so. 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 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.
• OliverJones 11y ago
  Radical suggestion: 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.
  • chmaynard 11y ago
    Did you even read the article?
• NickHaflinger 11y ago
  Alexander Coward: 'My student evaluations for the two classes I had completed were the highest on record in the Mathematics Department' 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/BlowingTheWhistleOnUCBerkeleyMathematics.html http://alexandercoward.com/BlowingTheWhistleOnUCBerkeleyMath...
• wbillingsley 11y ago
  His lectures are up on Vimeo, eg: https://vimeo.com/140890185 https://vimeo.com/140890185 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.
  • lloyd-christmas 11y ago
    For a healthy dose of realism... regardless of the publicity, nobody will care next year. The administration can likely just ignore it if they are actually comfortable with the status quo. If they had already wanted to make a change, this is just a nice springboard for them.
  • spaceflunky 11y ago
    I don't know much about this guy's story, but I do remember from my time as a UC Berkeley undergrad that being a popular lecturer with the students is a sure fire way to get yourself unpopular with the tenured staff. 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.
• sitkack 11y ago
  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.
• akjj 11y ago
  Let me offer up another version of Dr. Coward's story: An employee is hired and does his job brilliantly in some aspects and along some metrics, but his employer has complaints in other areas, which are hard to read since we haven't heard their side. These issues are brought up with the employee in writing multiple times over the course of a year: September 2013, April 2014, and November 2014. Apparently, the employee does not address the issues and instead insists that he's doing a brilliant job and that the employer's criticism is really about him being too awesome. Employer decides that they don't want a rogue employee and fires him in October 2014, effective June 2016. Why such almost 2 years of lead time? Maybe it's contractual, but I'm sure that if they really wanted to, they could fire him at the end of the academic year. I read this as the employer trying to get the employee to take them seriously and still giving him another chance to change. Now, in 2015, the employee obviously still doesn't care what the department thinks. 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.
  • jongraehl 11y ago
    My read: math teaching @Berkeley is in fact horrible and this offended him. He was happy to shame the incumbents and refuse to submit to mediocrity. Naturally he'd prefer to keep his job and reform by example, but his compensation for being fired is that he can righteously expose the corruption on evidence of his firing (and knowing he had this leverage is why he was so uncompromising in pursuing good teaching).
  • 11y ago
• RUG3Y 11y ago
  Wow, this blows my mind, but it doesn't surprise me. I encountered similar frustrations while doing an excellent job in the Marine Corps. I've come to believe that virtually any bureaucratic institution will be weighted this way.
  • unoti 11y ago
    Agreed. He's describing an organization where the leaders are not actually interested in doing a good job. An organization that's not a true meritocracy. An organization where actually playing the game is more important than doing a good job. 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.
• azorrap 11y ago
  I applaud Mr. Coward for trying to stand up to the institution that is motivated by money and not academic performance. An institution that has blinded themselves to what education is supposed to be all about. Mr. Coward - if you are reading this: You can't succeed in your effort alone. If students like you as much as you say they do, you must rally them to your cause. Get the student council involved. You must get as many of these students and their parents involved and hopefully several of these parents hold political power or donate large sums of money to the institution. If you have the hard facts to support your argument, you must get the media involved as well. Trust me on this - you must make this bigger then it is and begin to get the higher ups concerned about not only money, but their reputation. If you do not get the students involved, you will lose. I was a graduate student at a large, respected University, and taught every semester for years. I had a great reputation among the majors who sought me out for their lab TA. However, when freshmen started coming in less and less prepared but with increased feelings of entitlement and the thought that there is no need to work hard for a good grade, my test means for my non majors course started declining. The institution wanted me to dumb my non majors course down and I resisted telling them that there are more students coming into this University that just don't bother working hard and expect to get a passing grade anyway. My means were fine years before and if anything, my teaching had gotten better and my tests had gotten slightly easier. I resisted, but I knew that I would never be able to survive in that environment without tenure. So, I changed my career path. I would have been a great teacher and I do miss teaching. But the system is currently designed to stamp out those who do not conform no matter how successful they are with their students.
• chris_wot 11y ago
  I looked up one of Alexander Coward's lectures here: https://vimeo.com/137661254 https://vimeo.com/137661254 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.
• iskander 11y ago
  Ratings from http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=1835732 http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=1835732 might illuminate some of the back-story. Lots of unhappy reviews in there: >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.