Instructors Teach What They Want, Not What is Needed

It being summer and all, I don't suspect many of you are reading this blog. It is a relief to take the summer off and get away from the stresses of academia, especially if it is Electronic Technology where there is little good news about enrollments. But for those of you still monitoring this site, here is something I wanted to get off my chest for a while. This is one subject I have been wanting to comment on for some time now. It affects all of us who teach and it certainly has an impact on our students and the employers who will eventually hire them.

At a department meeting in the college where I teach occasionally, we were discussing curriculum changes and changes to course content to bring each course up to date. As those discussions often go, we got into a harangue about teaching bipolar transistors and biasing methods. Many of us know that it is a rare thing indeed if an AAS graduate technician ever really does have to know ten ways to bias a BJT. It just never comes up in the real world. Most textbooks still go on and on about that subject and many instructors teach all the gory details like load lines, temperature stabilization, etc. The recommendation was to drop all of that and expand coverage of MOSFETs since over 80% of all electronic circuits today use MOSFETs and not BJTs. We should still teach that BJTs need bias and give an example or two but it is not purdent to spend half the semester teaching it in lieu of far more important stuff that never gets included.

Anyway, and here is the core of this note, one of the instructors said and I paraphrase, "Lou, you can change the content and curriculum all you want, but I am still going to teach it the way I have always been teaching it for the past 15 years." Within that statement you have a clear picture of what is wrong with Electronics Technology education today. It includes an attitude problem as well as a rejection of adding any thing new or relevant. No wonder programs are so dated. The instructors fail to change. They are hell-bent not to change. Are you one of them?

I got to thinking about this attitude and approach and realized that most instructors practice it to some degree. Especially the part about teaching what they want. Instructors tend to teach what is familiar and subjects they like and are intimately familiar with. For one thing they never have to waste time learning anything new. Just walk into class and spout the same old stuff semester after semester, even if that subject is obsolete. When a colleague of mine said, "Lou, we are just teaching the history of electronics." I couldn't help but agree fully. I had a professor in college that continued to teach vacuum tube circuits because he felt that the concepts were still valid. While that may be partially true, think of what we were not learning about transistors.

It is not a tragedy to teach older concepts and they are often useful as perspective and conceptual. But, in an AAS program where time is of the essence, it is almost a criminal act to use up what precious semester time we have teaching non-relevant material when so much new and essential concepts, products, technologies do not get taught. It is appalling to me to see this. It hurts our graduates and their future employers.

Look, we all teach what we want and like. I find myself doing it. But at least I try to include the new material. And in most cases, at least with me, what I want and like is the new and interesting technologies that turn me on. Am I so weird that I like to learn new stuff on a regular basis? I must be as so many of my colleagues hate the idea. Are you so lazy that you cannot be bothered to devote some time to learning what is new and relevant? Evidentally.

Let me get a bit preachy here. It is ok to teach what you know and like. But, each time you teach it, try to drop one dated subject and replace it with a newer and more relevant subject. If you did that every time you taught the course, the whole course would gradually be updated as would you. Why not give that a try? Your reward is the lightening of your guilt.