[fn-mote]

Paraphrase: teaching a few classes at a community college can be great for you, in the begining, but probably not long term, and it is probably not great for your students.

You are doing something new, learning to communicate, potentially even learning some new material or a new perspective on something you know. At the very least, you get inspiration to create new materials (for teaching).

This experience is not great for your students. You are being trained on the job. They are looking for training. You are learning from the mistakes you make teaching them.

This isn't necessarily horrible. You teaching the class could still be better than the next best alternative. But the fact that CC (in the US, in STEM, IME) are not paying enough for this to be a viable career means that you will never stay long enough to be an experienced teacher who has figured out a solid approach to teaching the classes and students that you teach.

[yummypaint]

For comparison, going to school at a large research university will mean many of your classes are taught by TAs who are themselves PhD students right out of undergrad who may not have taught before or have any interest in teaching. They may also grade most of your work and provide most of your feedback, at least until the highest level classes. Someone who at least has industry experience with mentoring and giving feedback might be preferable.

[aaabre2476]

The people teaching at the community colleges don't tend to be new at teaching, since you need to already be financially well off to be able to do it. And the credential requirements are still high enough that you can't just walk in without at least a Master's and some level of industry experience that would allow you to easily make more in industry.

It isn't a "bootcamp" for aspiring professors. Think of it more as a public service for professors nearing retirement who actually like to teach and interact with the students.

[pxc]

> But the fact that CC (in the US, in STEM, IME) are not paying enough for this to be a viable career means that you will never stay long enough to be an experienced teacher who has figured out a solid approach to teaching the classes and students that you teach.

This wasn't my experience in community college in the US at all. I had a lot of instructors, including STEM instructors, who were very experienced and were in it because they loved to teach. Maybe part of what made that viable is that a state university also had a satellite campus in the same town, so for many of them, teaching at the community college was not their only job. Some of them also taught at that university, and many of those instructors also taught some identical classes at the two institutions.

My differential equations instructor, for example, even had a 'hard mode' section of that class at the community college every semester, which he taught in an identical fashion to the 300-level (third year) version of the course that he taught at the university. He told everyone in it that they could switch to one of the 'easy' ones if they preferred, because after all, it was at the community college and could only be offered for 200-level credit there. But that section of the course was really popular among the STEM-oriented students at the community college, who wanted to challenge themselves, get a deeper understanding, work more with proofs, better prepare for further education, etc.

Practical computing topics, like Unix systems administration and networking, were usually taught by people who still worked in industry and only taught 1 or 2 classes at a time. But sometimes those instructors had been doing that 1 class of theirs for a few years at least, and then their classes were really good.

I'm not sure what made each instructor like that choose to stick around and teach at the community college for years and years, but there were quite a few of them.

There were also some instructors at the same school who didn't know what they were doing or didn't give a fuck, basically high school redux. But I dropped all the classes I had with teachers like that.

There were a few gen eds that were taught by PhD students there, just like at a big university. But in those cases, they usually had already finished a master's degree, and the class was 12-20 people instead of 40-200. I found those classes to be pretty good, too.

Overall I would say that in my experience, the quality of education for intro-level courses and general education requirements is higher at the community colleges I went to than it was at the four-year university. (The in-major, senior-level courses at the university were phenomenal, though. Only a few of the community college courses rivaled those in quality, imo.)