People teach for different reasons - and an individual might choose it for several reasons. Some people do it because they really believe in it. Some yearn to do something that will make a positive difference for humanity. Some just do it because they're good at it and like doing it. There are others, though, who go into teaching because they're really not very competent at anything else. Others because they like the feeling of authority, or the ability to boss other people around. They're like petty apparatchiks who thrive on their ability to lord their minuscule power over in their puny domains.
Now, here is the difference between students who are going to be researchers and others - the other students just want to learn the material. They don't want to play games. They don't want to help prop the ego of some has-been professor. They just want to learn the stuff. I recall at least one time from my own academic career in which a teacher deliberately threw out an EXCELLENT text in order to teach from a standard, but crappy, one. HOWEVER, this same lowlife gave all of his lecture notes from the really good text book (without giving proper credit to where he got those notes from, btw).
This is not to say that I don't think it's ever appropriate for teachers to show a movie or tell a story. When I'm teaching, I often relate stories from job experiences - or from history or from some other subject area - that are pertinent to the subject of discussion. I obviously don't have a problem with this. What I have a problem with is the idea that teachers should actually teach anything.
This is not to say that I think teachers should always teach from the book. Here is what I typically did when I was teaching at university:
Give reading assignments from book.
Give some very simple problems due every class period (sometimes not graded) from book, plus a more difficult math, logic, or programming problem that had to be worked.
Give lecture on similar material that is in the book, but usually framed around my own particular bias. Usually lecture consisted of general theoretical discussion for one class and then another class of solving problems. (Technically I was an undergraduate and then a graduate teaching assistant, but in fact I never assisted anyone. I taught the entire class, and on one occasion had a person assisting me.)
I then gave harder programming assignments that would be due every 2 or 3 weeks. This assignment would extend some idea that I had introduced in my lectures.
So I might talk about parsing expressions, and then I would give some examples of how to parse them (which is trivial thing to do in some languages, but requires a moderate understanding to do from scratch). I would give several examples of this that were progressively more difficult. For this sort of lecture, I would have two big projects, each 2 weeks in duration. For the first, students would write an assembler to convert a hypothetical assembly language to a hypothetical machine code. For the second, they would write a virtual machine on which to run the program. The idea doesn't come from java, btw, but from an early computer game called red code.
Of course this is not the only way to teach. There may even be better ways to teach. I would never have been so successful if I had not been willing to accept criticism and act on it.
OTOH, what strikes me as the absolute worst thing a teacher can do is just stand there and waste students' time - as I perceive Count I. is suggesting.
The way I looked at it was this: The students are paying $20-$40 for a book for the class (this was some time ago). My salary is my tuition, plus a small stipend (maybe $500 a month). The students ought to get SOMETHING from me.
Now I had some great profs. And I also had a few whose sole contribution to "education" was to raise the temperature of the room by some fraction of a degree. For these fellows, university was basically a place to malinger. By any reasonable criteria, they were lazy and unproductive, but there's something about academia that permits a few slothful individuals to thrive (Ironically, the most widely published author in our dept was also the least competent. Many of the most brilliant students flocked to him, because he was considered brilliant by people who never worked with him. Only after the fact did they realize what a complete boob he was.) I took him for a class in simulation - my specialty now - and came to understand his ability for spouting nonsense that sounded brilliant on the surface of it (at least to the untrained observer).
Different example: I took chem I and II - same prof each time. This guy was pretty famous. He was the dept chair and seemed to be always on the news as an expert. In two classes - he tried each day to solve a problem on the board. At no time was he ever able to solve a single problem - not once. This is not hyberbole. I literally mean he could not solve the simplest problem from the book. Not one time.
And while I think most of my professors were pretty good, there were enough of this sort to cause me to raise hackles even now, decades after the fact. I don't understand how these guys can accept their salaries and look at themselves in the mirror.
