Dear New College Student: thoughts from a professor

[Ms. Toad]

4. What are you suggesting isn't how the real world works?

I've been in education for all but 23 of my nearly 67 years on this planet - either as a student (24) or teacher (24) - including a few when I was both a student and a teacher.

My experience ranges from a rural one-room country school, to a large urban 99.9% black high school to two medium-sized universities.
It includes both elite private universities and public universities. There are a few minor quibbles I have with what he says (TAs being as good or better than professors, for example - and from my perspective as a teacher - not noticing and self-correcting a transposition of digits in a grade before having a discussion with the student). And there are a few exceptions: a teacher at the one-room country school whose education ended with high school and who was racist and also intimidated by my 11-year old intellect. There were a handful of incompetent professors (one at the elite college, and two in law school). But it's generally good and accurate advice.

From my perspective as a student, virtually all of my professors/instructors cared about me. From my perspective as an instructor - far too few students bothered to interact with me outside the classroom - until it came time to prep for the bar exam. And, it was by and large the ones who didn't bother to interact who complained about unfairness, inaccessibility, etc. (For the record, while I can't objectively measure my own fairness, I was by any objective means the most accessible faculty member for the last 10 years - being accessible anytime I wasn't teaching from 11 AM through 2 AM, including most saturdays and sundays.)