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It’s a safe place to vent about bad experiences you’ve had or heard from others. But I will push back when it comes to making vague and sweeping generalizations without evidence. Especially considering this is a forum with international comrades, so without even specifying region, this thread is implying there’s a universal thing going on where STEM teachers are “often very aggressive and abusive”, which is an extraordinary claim to make and one that has no provided basis for why it would make any sense at all as a cross-cultural phenomenon let alone one that would be primarily found in STEM.
If this seems like I’m going too hard over a thread title, imagine that you swapped out the subject matter of the title for a historically marginalized group. How easy it would be to launder reactionary views under the guise of levying a complaint. It’s not a good habit for us to be in speaking about the world in this way. I get how much easier it can be to do it vs. digging into detail, but we should strive to be a good example here, to learn from each other and then be able to bring that to organizing.
8 daysIf anything, math teachers were either boring or really nice in my experience here in my area of the lone stool state
- 9 days
This seems a bit too generalized to draw any conclusions. Of all the teachers I’ve had issues with, there has been no clear category of subjects they taught. On the contrary, I don’t think I’ve ever had an issue with a STEM teacher.
Having also worked as a teacher for 12-15 year olds and I can tell you that of all the reasons teenagers “hated” STEM subjects, I don’t think me or my colleagues were the primary ones.
I will say that the problem with some STEM teachers, but primarily professors in this instance, is some become such experts in a given field, they simply cannot comprehend that others do not know the material as well as themselves. This breed either arrogance, or, worse, an obliviousness that makes learning from such teachers agonizing, as they blow through material that “everyone obviously understands from the first go”.
Those teachers usually love throwing out inane curveballs on exams too, because, “One could easily extrapolate this novel, never before seen problem using what we’ve learned in class”! Before becoming upset, or confused as to why seventy percent of the class is failing or barely passing despite immense effort.
- 9 days
Yea this is a common stereotype. Obviously I can only speak from my own experience in STEM, but the best teachers have generally been the professors who knew the material best, i.e. the most respected experts in their field.
The worst teachers were the professors who had to give a topic/course in a field or sub-field which werent their primary interest.
Oh! I absolutely agree. The best professors I ever had not only knew their material well but loved what they were teaching dearly. I was more so speaking to a very select subset of professors whose professional obliviousness, whether willful or not, causes an inability to understand the perspective of the learner. That lack, in turn, oftentimes renders their class an agonizing, stressful mess that few look back on fondly.
That group of professors is hardly a majority, but are strikingly prevalent within stem in comparison to other faculties.
XCDC is once again relevant
From my experience, teachers in STEM are quite demanding. Sometimes that results in a more relaxed atmosphere. Other times that can be near verbal abuse. It really depends on the person.
- 9 days
Can’t speak to this specifically, but in my experience most school teachers in general should absolutely not be teachers given the way they conduct themselves toward pupils, saying and doing things they would never dare to say or do towards anyone else.
I suspect that this is probably less common in tertiary institutions though.
I am not a professor however i did study C.S and i have a masters, and in my experience i would say there is no general rule about this, in UNI i had great teachers that are very compassionate and understanding, and the opposite, same with non stem subjects to be quite frank, i had arrogant literature teachers and the opposite and so on. Most of the bad teachers i had i must say it was not for some holier than thou reasoning, but generally to either a lack of competence or, more often than not, an inability to communicate ideas clearly, basically you feel as if they’re just reading words at you with no added value. I do realize that my line of argumentation is purely anecdotal, however i must say comrade that our biases as humans are oftentimes very much blinding, one bad apple will make you hate apples in general.
I’m a STEM teacher. What do you mean by aggressive and abusive? Maybe I can try to make sense of the behavior? Also, what year and subjects are we talking about, if you want to share that?
Some of your colleagues treat learners like petulant children who they can hardly contain their disgust for. Imagine Terence Fletcher from Whiplash, but teaching a chemistry lesson. Those same people often would hardly care if half their class died in a violent explosion since anyone’s presence is nothing but an annoyance.
God forbid you don’t understand the material the first time around. Have fun getting the most passive-aggressive, patronizing, demeaning, dehumanizing, and demoralizing beatdown during office hours, or worse, in front of the class. Making fun of students, degrading comments, and open mockery are usually just the opening act. The best of the best is when those faculty treat students like a misbehaving, intellectually stunted child.
This behavior is not nearly the majority, but is prevalent among STEM in a way I have never seen tolerated amongst any other faculty.
I speak from a university level perspective. Where many among the STEM faculty absolutely deserve the abysmal teacher’s rating they earn.
At a university level you can find a lot of STEM professors who signed up for the research, and have no interest in teaching. That causes a lot of issues and I’ve experienced this both on the inside and outside. Also, some of them take it upon themselves to be gatekeepers for the field. Meaning they think that by being hard on students, they ensure only the best end up taking those careers. Others think they are preparing students for how hard it can get in future courses. You can also blame a good chunk on arrogance and self-importance. And as others have pointed out, an inherent failure to understand what students know and how to get down to that level to help them learn more.
Ultimately though, it’s good to remember that university teachers are NOT trained teachers. They have no idea how to transmit ideas, especially if they are young, unless they were lucky enough to absorb good teaching methods through their own student experience, or they learned how to be better teachers through self-reflection, experience, and trial-and-error.
At a school level, things can be a bit different. The STEM fields in many countries have overloaded curriculi, and in many cases schools are understaffed. As a result, you get overworked teachers being under tremendous stress to finish a vast and difficult curriculum in a very finite time, trying to wrangle a class of overworked and hyperactive children/teenagers who become disinterested due to the difficulty of the subject. It can really become a vicious cycle in some cases.
That’s not to say that school STEM teachers can’t have the failings of university STEM teachers, but there’s different factors at play. In my current job (at a high school), out of 25 or so STEM teachers (total for the various subjects), I’d say 5-6 definitely fall in the category of teachers you’d hate. At a previous job (lab technician and teaching assistant in a university) I’d say out of 50 or so professors I was working with, probably 10 were good and beloved teachers. But that’s always going to be subjective.
And I should point out that as a school STEM teacher for all levels, I always keep in mind that things do get much harder as students progress classes, and missing out on even small details early on can be detrimental later on. So I try to be a bit strict in class to save up on the time needed to help the students understand the subject, rather than just brush on the basics and have them memorize the rest. In some rare cases that gets me in trouble with parents, but in most cases students actually understand this approach and appreciate it. That’s because I’m upfront about it from the beginning, and I get the sense that students like being treated like equals in that way, so they get on with the program.
I’m only saying this to illustrate that many teachers, even at university level, don’t really know how to treat students as humans like this. They always see their class as a bunch of children, regardless of age, and as a result the students see the teacher as a senile uptight dictator.
At any rate, my advice to you is that you should understand it’s unavoidable to encounter these kinds of bad teachers. Sometimes there’s not much you can do about it. Take whatever you can from their class, or see if there’s a way to approach them more personally to learn something from them. But generally, just sigh and then adapt your studying to the situation. If they keep referencing things you don’t understand, and fail to explain them, then note it down and go look up that stuff on your own. If their attitude is dismissive and arrogant, then seek help in understanding something from other students or professors in the same field.
I was in humanities, so I can’t really say much because I just had to do written work. Most people I saw studying or getting tutoring in the libraries in the two college I went to were in STEM.
There is a big push for STEM and I suspect a lot of people joined because they thought it was a degree that would make them lots of money even though they are really bad at the subject.
Teachers get exploited like any other worker, and performing for a class of students multiple times a day is super stressful if you’re already at your limit of capacity. STEM subjects usually require more guidance from a teacher than other subjects because if a student does not understand a particular concept, they are unable to practice and thus cannot get better. So it requires a lot from a teacher to identify which students are stuck and how they can help the student get unstuck. The stress for the student and teacher alike can make the whole experience horrible for both of them. That’s not to excuse abusive or aggressive behaviour, which is always wrong. But the source of this issue is not abusive teachers, it’s a system that puts so much stress on teachers that they are not able to give students the attention they require and are more likely to have issues with regulating their emotions.
- 8 days
i agree that teachers, doctors are overwhelmed but its kind of hard to get ovr it when youre the one they take it out on isnt it
- 9 days
In my country we didn’t really have proper STEM classes besides Math obviously. Well at least the „branch“ I visited. Biology was the one with most focus and we only did surface level stuff- it was about 2 classes per week. Chemistry was turning on the bunsenburner and very dry basic Stoichiometry. And physics was repeating math lessons because our teacher was a dud.
Most students definitely saw it as pointless and a waste of time.
No, it’s relatively true. Depends on the subject and how much prestige comes with it I suppose. There’s brutal dickheads at every job in the world but I’ve noticed that you’re probably gonna get more dickhead engineers at a biomedical/medical manufacturing facility then say at a wastewater treatment plant. This is anecdotal, so not sure about teachers.
In my opinion, people hate the STEM subjects because we’re brought up under the impression that academia is the gatekeeper to a better life and that non-STEM degrees are worthless, because we’re force-fed a curated window into these subjects selected entirely based on testability on a timed schedule that limits real exploration and curiosity, and because we’re then looked upon with disappointment if we perform worse than our peers mainly due to differences in our capacity to get interested and engaged in what’s been put in front of us.
I was a math professor in a past life and hope to be again after my medical stuff clears up, and I think math is the one hit hardest here. Math is fun for me when there’s creativity involved and it’s not just being handed problems where the answer will always be found by reducing the problem to a calculation and then working through the calculation. Until I took an upper-level course in undergrad, I thought math was calculations. I started undergrad towards cs, but a math minor would have been like three extra courses so I decided adding that might help my career and it was like a completely different world opened up to me. I got a D in my first real analysis course and barely scraped by with a C on retake, but I loved it so much that I switched majors and eventually pursued a phd. A couple years after those real analysis courses I concluded analysis is one of the most boring branches of math for me, and I still feel that way, but at the time I had never experienced anything like it.
The problem is that it’s unrealistic and unfair to grade students on the kind of creative skills that are needed for the math I enjoy until you get to a point where you can blame them for signing up for it voluntarily. Calculations are very easy to break into concrete steps where you can point out what a student needs to fix, then say it’s their fault if they don’t fix it. They’re gradable, and in a world where the purpose of academia is economic opportunity, no topic can be important enough to be mandatory unless it’s gradable.
When students would come to office hours for help and were really, really struggling to solve problems, what I saw was minds that were locking up from anxiety, not minds that weren’t strong enough to grasp the logic. There’s this stereotype that you have to be smart to do math, but it’s more the other way around. Doing math makes people perceive you as smart.
I genuinely believe that you can teach almost any preschooler basic arithmetic reasoning - that numbers represent how many of something there are, that we don’t have to know what that “something” is for the number to have meaning, and what adding and subtracting mean conceptually as opposed to how to add and subtract by pushing symbols on a paper around correctly. I genuinely believe that if you did this with almost any preschooler, they would perform better than their peers in their first math class, conclude they are “good at math”, and do well in their future math classes. They won’t be the ones worried about whether they end up with an asshole teacher or not.
Teachers are limited in their ability to be overly empathetic to students’ plight here because even if we gave up leisure and sleeping and literally everything else in our lives, we still wouldn’t have enough hours to give each and every student the support they deserve. Any shortcut we can take to be generous without sacrificing our own time will put our livelihood at risk - if too many students end up in someone else’s course with poor understanding of the prerequisite material from ours, we’ll lose our jobs. We’re forced to accept that some students in need will be abandoned if we have any interest in survival. Some become more hardened than others, but it’s the reality for all of us.
