Posted by Rick Denney on September 09, 2002 at 10:40:37:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Why should we have to defend teachers? posted by Kenneth Sloan on September 08, 2002 at 22:29:02:
At least the MIT physics professor would design a bridge that would stand up. He would probably blow the budget of both time and money, and he might drive himself crazy (and everyone around him), but in the end, it would stand.
On the other hand, let me ask you this. Would you be more willing to hire me to design the bridge? I'm a licensed professional civil engineer in three states, and legally certified to design bridges. But I haven't done bridge design in 25 years--since college, in fact.
As you say, it's a bad example, so let me change it a bit.
In my industry, there is a new certification process, known as the Professional Traffic Operations Engineer. The stated and unstated reasons for creating this new certification were to 1.) to promote expertise among traffic engineers, 2.) to give prospective clients an ability to discern that expertise, 3.) to feed an industry of continuing education and pre-certification training establishments, including my professional society and the institutions of every single one of the academics that created the test for the certification, and 4.) to give traffic engineers some more fancy-sound letters to hang after their names on their business cards. The second two reasons were the real reasons. Many of the people who created the test were academics who had never actually worked in a real agency doing traffic engineering, and the questions on the test show it--a strong bias to theoretical aphorisms that any practitioner with experience would want to moderate. Thus, for me to take the test, I will have to study not how I and other experts actually do this work, but rather how the professors think I should do this work, which means I'll have to set aside a good amount of my experience.
The first two reasons for the certification still exist as words but not in practice, because the elements of the certification process ware never traced back to them. I believe that my general expertise in this line of work should allow me to take the test without significant studying or changing much of what I know, and still score near 100%. That I can't suggests that the test was designed to fulfil the wrong purpose. Thus, even I as an expert will have to take the training class before certification, even though I have no doubt that I know more about the subject than the teachers of that class.
So, would you want a PTOE-certified academic doing your signal timing, or would you want me doing it, having done it in the real world for years? I think I agree with Marc, what you as a college teacher know about teaching would probably translate better to the high-school classroom than a lot of the educational gobbledygook that the education establishment insists is necessary.
Rick "a PTOE in fact only" Denney