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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2024-10-09  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] What does the author imply in the first paragraph?
选项 A、Teachers’ performances at most colleges are totally measured by students.
B、Parents always think they paid money for getting the best teachers for their children.
C、Colleges should trust parents instead of teachers to reform their teacher structure.
D、None above is correct.
答案 B
解析 本题为细节题。第一段第一句话说明了学期是以学生对老师的评价结束的，而并非答案A中说的学生的评价对老师的去留起决定性作用。C答案说到学校教师的结构改革问题，第一段也未提及。答案B可以从第一段中“We’ve just paid you tens of thousands…you had no right taking our money．”这句话可以推断出家长付学费是为了得到更好的老师。
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