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  3. As at most colleges, our semester at Notre Dame ends with student evaluation

As at most colleges, our semester at Notre Dame ends with student evaluation

游客2023-11-12  29
问题     As at most colleges, our semester at Notre Dame ends with student evaluations of their teachers. Each time I wonder what the students—and their parents—make of this exercise. "Wait," I imagine them saying, "we’ve just paid you tens of thousands of dollars in tuition to take courses at your school, and now you’re asking us to tell you if the teachers you hired are any good? If you didn’t already know that they’re first class, you had no right taking our money."
    Who are these successful teachers? Ph.D.s from first-class programs, of course, but that’s because college teaching and research require a high level of specialist knowledge. Beyond this knowledge, college teachers do a good job because of qualities that they already have when they complete their undergraduate education: a high level of intelligence, enthusiasm for ideas and an ability to communicate. With faculties of the "best and the brightest" from the pool of under-graduates, colleges can be confident of good quality teaching. The professional community itself is, on the whole, able to ensure a high level of competence among its members.
    These reflections lead me to a simple proposal. Adopt the same model for grade school and high school teaching that works for colleges. Currently, few of the best students from the best colleges are grade school or high school teachers.
    Top doctoral programs have far more applicants than they can accept, and many excellent students don’t apply, either because they do not have a high enough level of specialized skills or because they do not want to risk the terrible job market for college teachers. Such students would form a natural pool for non-college teaching if the pay and working conditions were anywhere near the level of the college average.
    So why not make use of all this talent to develop an elite class of professionals—like those who teach in our colleges—and give them primary responsibility for K-12 education? One objection is that teaching children and teenagers requires a set of social/emotional abilities—to empathize, to nurture, to discipline—that have little connection with the intellectual qualities of the "best" college students. But there is no reason to think that people who are smart, articulate and enthusiastic about ideas are in general less likely to have these non-intellectual abilities.
    It’s sometimes urged that a high level of intellectual ability is not needed to understand high-school, not to say grade-school, subjects. This is true, but with our current low standards it is not unheard of to find teachers who lack even this basic understanding.
    Moreover, it requires considerable intelligence to respond adequately to the questions of bright students. Most important, the greatest intellectual challenge of teaching at any level is to find ways of presenting the content effectively. More intelligent teachers will be both more likely to develop on their own better methods of teaching and better able to understand and apply any wisdom that may come to them from above.
    In every other area of intellectual endeavor, we have succeeded by creating a professional class drawn from those who have excelled as college undergraduates. We need to do the same for primary and secondary education.
                                            From The New York Times, June 7, 2012 [br] Which of the following is NOT true about the doctoral programs according to the author?
选项 A、There is a decreasing number of people who want to apply for doctoral programs.
B、The reason students don’t want to apply for it is that college teachers do not make big money.
C、The other reason students don’t want to apply for it is that they do not have a high level of specialized skills.
D、It is not wise to apply for doctoral programs because there are enough college teachers already.
答案 D
解析 本题为细节题。第四段中说到博士课程越来越受到众人的冷落是因为——申请者的专业知识不够扎实，博士毕业以后的就业前景不乐观。因此D答案所谓的“大学教师人数已足够”是无中生有，文章并未提及。而A、B、C选项均符合大意。因此正确答案为D。
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