How to Hire a Professor
Picking, and preparing for, college courses
Your presence here at Extra Muros tells me that, guilders to goobers, you appreciate the great chasm, filled to the brim with burning lava, that separates ‘schooling’ from ‘learning’. At the same time, the fact that you are reading this article suggests that you, or someone you love, is thinking about taking a college course, or two, or twelve, at some point in the near future.
With these things in mind, I offer, and then expand upon, a wee paradox. Your professor will play a minor role in the things that you actually learn in the course. Nonetheless, the most important thing to consider when choosing a course remains the personality of the person standing in front of the class. To put things another way, while the right professor cannot preserve you from having to do a great deal of learning on your own, the wrong professor can ruin any academic experience.
You Gotta Shop Around
Happily, the internet abounds with information about the professors you might want to hire. Websites that store academic articles, such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate, will show you some of the products of a professor’s pen. Websites like Ratemyprofessors.com, Coursicle, and Uloop do for teachers what Yelp does for restaurants.
Leafing through the published work of an academic wrote will give you some sense of his communications skills, and, in particular, his ability to express complex ideas in simple, accessible, prose. (I have, alas, known some truly awful teachers who wrote well. I have yet, however, to run into a good teacher who wrote badly.)
Looking at professional papers, will also give you a good sense of topics that interest the author, and, thus, some of the ideas, issues, and examples that will play a role in the courses that he teaches. (To offer a simple example, a teacher who fills pages with references to ‘the ten yard line’ and ‘utility infielders’ will, in all likelihood, also rely on sports metaphors in the classroom.)
When reading reviews, look for descriptions of the things that the instructor actually does (or fails to do.) In other words, ‘lectures by reading the PowerPoint slides provided with the teacher’s edition of the textbook’ tells you a lot more than ‘worst professor ever’.
If the aforementioned websites fail to paint a sufficiently detailed picture of a professor, you can always ask permission to sit in on a class or two. Indeed, even if you have found lots of information on the internet, first-hand observation can uncover traits and tendencies of particular importance to you.
Learn Before You Study
The experience of formal schooling has trained us to treat a course like a ride at an amusement park, to cede control of the experience from the instant the safety bar falls upon your lap to the moment that it lifts. That is, unless we take pains to avoid this trap, we limit our reading to assigned texts, let the syllabus build fences around our curiosity, and, and, worst of all, ask the question that has killed more minds than fentanyl: ‘Teacher, will this be on the test?’
I propose that, rather than doing this, you take a very different approach to the completion of the courses that stand between you and your goal. In particular, I recommend that, once you have picked your professor, or, at the very least, avoided the truly awful instructors, you exercise the virtues of the self-directed learner - independence of mind, creativity in choice of tools, sense of responsibility, and fondness for reflection. To put this another way, I recommend that you treat the subject of the course as a kind of hobby.
Exactly how you do this will depend upon the subject. I suspect, however, that it will start with videos that poke fun at the field in question. Thus, for example, a one-minute skit in which a radiologist chats with his therapist just introduced me to the concept of Hounsfield units.
You will also benefit from works designed to introduce a particular topic, field, or subject members of the general population. These books will usually sport titles that include such phrases as ‘idiot’s guide’, ‘for dummies’, or ‘a very short introduction’. (You may even wish to listen to the podcast that provides ‘very short introductions’ to books in the series called Very Short Introductions.)
