Welcome to The Valve
Login
Register
Valve Links
The Front Page
Statement of Purpose
Current Authors
John Holbo - Editor
Scott Eric Kaufman - Editor
Aaron Bady
Adam Roberts
Amardeep Singh
Andrew Seal
Bill Benzon
Daniel Green
Jonathan Goodwin
Joseph Kugelmass
Lawrence LaRiviere White
Marc Bousquet
Matt Greenfield
Miriam Burstein
Ray Davis
Rohan Amanda Maitzen
Sean McCann
Guest Authors
Past Authors
Laura Carroll
Mark Bauerlein
Miriam Jones
Most recent articles
Steam Cleaning: The Valve Blogroll
Sister Carrie and Television
A Defense of Literary Studies Anyone?
Bad Books
Disciplinary Tension? Or, Holbo Meet Hillis
The Valley of Elah as our Heart of Darkness
“what-have-you intriguing subject”
Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas
Time’s Arrow in Literary Space
Martin Amis’s Pregnant Widow
Baddest of the Bad
The “Crisis” in Literary Studies, by Mimi & Eunice
The Hurt Locker’s Addiction to Detachment, and Ours
Academic Publishing Again (or, Still)
Learning to Remember
Most recent comments
Rich Puchalsky on A Defense of Literary Studies Anyone?
Rohan Amanda Maitzen on A Defense of Literary Studies Anyone?
Jessica Lewis-Turner on A Defense of Literary Studies Anyone?
ajay on The Hurt Locker’s Addiction to Detachment, and Ours
Luther Blissett on A Defense of Literary Studies Anyone?
Tony Christini on Disciplinary Tension? Or, Holbo Meet Hillis
Bill Benzon on Disciplinary Tension? Or, Holbo Meet Hillis
StevenAugustine on A Defense of Literary Studies Anyone?
Athena Andreadis on Bad Books
Rohan Amanda Maitzen on "what-have-you intriguing subject"
Tony Christini on Disciplinary Tension? Or, Holbo Meet Hillis
Bill Benzon on "what-have-you intriguing subject"
Rohan Amanda Maitzen on "what-have-you intriguing subject"
Ray Davis on Graphs, Maps, Trees and Breeding
Sisyphus on Sister Carrie and Television
Archives
Syndication
Articles
RSS 1.0 | RSS 2.0 | Atom
Comments
RSS 1.0 | RSS 2.0 | Atom
Validation
XHTML | CSS
Credits
Powered by Expression Engine
Logo by John Holbo
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons License.
Blogroll
2blowhards
About Last Night
Academic Splat
Acephalous
Amardeep Singh
Beatrice
Bemsha Swing
Bitch. Ph.D.
Blogenspiel
Blogging the Renaissance
Bookslut
Booksquare
Butterflies & Wheels
Cahiers de Corey
Category D
Charlotte Street
Cheeky Prof
Chekhov’s Mistress
Chrononautic Log
Cliopatria
Cogito, ergo Zoom
Collected Miscellany
Completely Futile
Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind
Conversational Reading
Critical Mass
Crooked Timber
Culture Cat
Culture Industry
CultureSpace
Early Modern Notes
Easily Distracted
fait accompi
Fernham
Ferule & Fescue
Ftrain
GalleyCat
Ghost in the Wire
Giornale Nuovo
God of the Machine
Golden Rule Jones
Grumpy Old Bookman
Ideas of Imperfection
Idiocentrism
Idiotprogrammer
if:book
In Favor of Thinking
In Medias Res
Inside Higher Ed
jane dark’s sugarhigh!
John & Belle Have A Blog
John Crowley
Jonathan Goodwin
Kathryn Cramer
Kitabkhana
Languagehat
Languor Management
Light Reading
Like Anna Karina’s Sweater
Lime Tree
Limited Inc.
Long Pauses
Long Story, Short Pier
Long Sunday
MadInkBeard
Making Light
Maud Newton
Michael Berube
Moo2
MoorishGirl
Motime Like the Present
Narrow Shore
Neil Gaiman
Old Hag
Open University
Pas au-delà
Philobiblion
Planned Obsolescence
Printculture
Pseudopodium
Quick Study
Rake’s Progress
Reader of depressing books
Reading Room
ReadySteadyBlog
Reassigned Time
Reeling and Writhing
Return of the Reluctant
S1ngularity::criticism
Say Something Wonderful
Scribblingwoman
Seventypes
Shaken & Stirred
Silliman’s Blog
Slaves of Academe
Sorrow at Sills Bend
Sounds & Fury
Splinters
Spurious
Stochastic Bookmark
Tenured Radical
the Diaries of Franz Kafka
The Elegant Variation
The Home and the World
The Intersection
The Litblog Co-Op
The Literary Saloon
The Literary Thug
The Little Professor
The Midnight Bell
The Mumpsimus
The Pinocchio Theory
The Reading Experience
The Salt-Box
The Weblog
This Public Address
This Space: The Fire’s Blog
Thoughts, Arguments & Rants
Tingle Alley
Uncomplicatedly
Unfogged
University Diaries
Unqualified Offerings
Waggish
What Now?
William Gibson
Wordherders
<< Into Lévi-Strauss and Out Through “Kubla Khan” | Front Page | Links: Sex, Theory, Prejudice, and Empathy >>
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
Superstar Teachers
Posted by Bill Benzon on 12/08/09 at 12:35 PM
Over at Marginal Revolution Alex Tabarrok is arguing that: “universities will move to a superstar market for teachers in which the very best teachers use on-line instruction and TAs to teach thousands of students at many different universities. ... At GMU some of our best teachers are being recruited by other universities with very attractive offers and some of our most highly placed students have earned their positions through excellence in teaching rather than through the more traditional route of research.”
So superstar teacher = manager of countless TA drones in cubicles behind computer monitors? This is incoherent on the face of it. You don’t need superstars to do that, just middle managers.
I’m not sure how it’s supposed to work, Jonathan. I’d think you’d need the teacher to create the charismatic lectures and the other course materials. Now, whether the superstar teacher also manages the TA cadre, or whether an assistant does that, or a middle manager, or whether the middle manager rides herd on both the superstar and the TA’s, I don’t know.
Meet our new superstar trumpet professor, Dizzy Gillespie! (Show some youtube videos of Dizzy).
Meet our new painting instructor, Jackson Pollock (show video of Pollock painting.)
With this model, you wouldn’t even have to have instructors that were living and breathing. Are superstar teachers inherently superstar lecturers? If so, and you can simply record the lectures, you would need only ONE instructor for calculus, say, for the entire English-speaking world. Just find the person who can explain a subject the best and you need no other lecturers.
Scads of university lectures are already out there, & from top notch schools. See, e.g.:
http://academicearth.org/
Add a comment:
