Chris Johnston

I have some complaints about the quality of my university education here in Canada. Now, I have only been to one university — Ryerson — so my sample base for these complaints is not exactly large. However, I am going to make the generalization that my complaints are probably accurate for just about any university in Canada.

My first complaint is against my Profs. If education is about communicating ideas to students in such a way that those students can understand and build upon those ideas then why are so many professors hired who can not communicate? Either the prof does not speak english well enough for students to understand them or they simply can not communicate an idea well enough for someone to understand it. Both are equally wrong. Both should get a teacher fired. Now, do not misinterpret my first remark as racist or anti-immegrant. I have had some excellent professors that had accents and were very definitely not born in this country. My complaints are simply against people who can not speak english well enough to communicate. I have known a few third and forth generation Canadians who I would put into this category.

My second complaint is about professors trying to teach things that they have no experience with. I currently am taking a course on Software Engineering in which the professor is teaching XP (extreme programming). I asked the prof what his professional experience was with XP and said he did not have any. Something is wrong with that. Just because he read it in a book and tried it out a few times does not an expert make. And profs should be experts at what they teach.

Unfortunately, university professors are not hired for their teaching abilities, they are hired for their PhDs and/or their area of research. The universities don’t have if professors can teach. Teaching is just something that they do on the side that interrupts their research.