Reply #9: That's interesting... [View All]

[GaYellowDawg]

I just finished a year teaching biology at a community college and students constantly called my courses challenging but interesting. I would encourage anyone to do their core coursework at a community college; the instructional quality is, in my experience, a hell of a lot better. Students are in lecture classes of 30 instead of 300, they get their labs taught by their lecture instructors instead of grad students who resent being there, their lecture instructors are at the college to teach rather than to do research, and in a lot of cases, the instructional technology is better for the lower-level courses. I've gotten a PhD and taught labs at a Tier I research university. For an incoming freshman, the educational experience that I was able to offer at the community college was a lot better because I had much better departmental/administrative support for teaching, and the instructional technology was at a much higher level. I went from using powerpoints off of my own laptop at the university to using a better computer, a SmartBoard with a high definition projector, and piloting the use of iPads in class for instructional reinforcement and assessment.

In many cases, what you consider to be "rigor" - difficult coursework - is coursework that's made more difficult by lack of instructional quality. When I went to my 4 year school after 2 years at a community college, I had a better grasp of many fundamentals than my peers because I'd had better teachers. When I was back at that community college as a teacher, the quality hadn't slipped an iota; the administration and department demanded excellence in teaching from its faculty to a degree that simply was not present at the university level.