Re: Looking for a good Ada 95 book

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <57q6g7$ako@news.ccit.arizona.edu>,
Frank Manning <frank@bigdog.engr.arizona.edu> wrote:

>Whoa, whoa, hold on a minute, time out.

>Do I understand this right? Senior professors standing in line to teach
>intro courses? What planet did you guys say you were from? :-)

>I thought Standard Operating Procedure was to offload intro courses on
>grad student TA's. And I thought academia's Holy Grail is to be promoted
>out of teaching altogether...

These questions merit semi-serious answers.

I talk to lots of intro-course teachers, on the net,
at conferences, etc. The only generalization here is that there are
no generalizations. It really varies with each school's "culture."

For example, the US is filled with colleges/universities that are
either 4-year colleges with no grad programs, or in some cases have
relatively small grad programs and so give a very high priority to their
undergrad programs. 

One thinks here of the many, many 4-year state campuses, but also of 
first-rate private schools like Williams, Dartmouth, Brown, Princeton, 
and others. In all these the intro courses are taught by regular faculty, 
and sometimes very senior regular faculty at that. I got my B.S.E. at
Princeton, for example, and (as I recall) every intro course teacher 
I had was established and well-known in his field. Grad students taught
labs and recitations. This was 30 years ago, but not much has changed 
in places like that.

My son is a freshman at Brown and reports a similar culture there.
The grad students are _assistants_, with senior folks doing the
lectures.

In big Ph.D.-granting universities, the culture still varies a lot from
place to place. I am aware of some in which the intro courses are
taught by senior faculty, others where grad teaching assistants
hold sway, and still others where the intro courses are taught by
non-tenured (and often non-tenurable) "lecturers" whose continuing
employment is at the mercy of the senior tenured faculty.

Robert Dewar is quite senior at NYU, and I am quite senior (22 years)
at GW, and we both enjoy teaching these foundation courses. I can't
speak for Robert, but I teach everyone from freshmen to doctoral 
students, sometimes both in the same semester.

One last point - the CSAB criteria for accreditation of US undergrad 
programs in computer science (http://www.acm.org/~csab) have something
to say on this issue:

   The number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) faculty required of the 
   program will be influenced by such factors as the number of students 
   in the program, the number of courses required by the program, the 
   demand for computer science courses by non-computer science majors, 
   the existence of other programs in which the faculty are involved, 
   and the teaching load of the faculty. 

   There must be sufficient FTE faculty with primary commitment to the 
   program to provide continuity and stability. Qualified instructors 
   other than full-time faculty may be used in a supplemental role, but 
   full-time faculty should oversee all course work and should cover at 
   least 70% of the total classroom instruction. 

   etc.

Of course, this does not say that _intro_ courses should be taught by
FT faculty, but in CSAB-accredited programs (see list on the web site)
they often are anyway.

Mike Feldman
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Michael B. Feldman -  chair, SIGAda Education Working Group
Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The George Washington University -  Washington, DC 20052 USA
202-994-5919 (voice) - 202-994-0227 (fax) 
http://www.seas.gwu.edu/faculty/mfeldman
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       Pork is all that money the government gives the other guys.
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WWW: http://www.adahome.com or http://info.acm.org/sigada/education
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