Falliable Fiend wrote:
"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)."

I'm not going to defend the indefensable. But then again I have serious questions about your ability, as an undergrad, to presume upon yourself the role of knowing a good textbook from a bad one.

If a student takes biology to become a biologist they deserve the very best educational experience possible that leads them to their desired goal. If they are taking the biology class because it is required and don't care about biology they desere the best possible experience in biology. There is no difference between these two objectives.

The instructor's responsibility is to teach the students how to think. In a field with a huge amount of material it is up to the instuctor to act as a filter ... to indicate what information is important and/or general ... what information is unimportant and/or specific. It is the instructor's responsibility to make the material accessable and to help the student learn how to absorb it, interpret it, and build upon it.

If they fail they fail. And the goal of the student is irrelevant to the instructor's failure. No good institution and no good instructor makes value judgements such as ... this student wants to be a biologist so we'll give them a good education and this person wants to be a psychologist so lets send them off to macrame' class.


DA Morgan