Page:Engineering as a vocation (IA cu31924004245605).pdf/99

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
85

as instructors, their knowledge limited to what is taught within the walls of that institution, and, like all small men, become vainglorious and prideful within a few years so that progress for them is impossible. The boys who pass under their hands are in a pitiful plight. In mathematics and physics especially, these men are bad, for after conducting one class through the text book the teacher can rest his brain and become just as lazy as he likes, and that is often very lazy indeed when a man's brain begins to atrophy, so that many professors actually get the idea strongly fixed in their heads that ' 'once a teacher, always a teacher," regardless of whether their work is productive of real results. On this point the reader is referred to an editorial entitled "About Dismissing Professors," in the Popular Science Monthly for March, 1911.

Many instructors did try practical work for a short time after graduation, as will be remembered was the case with "Kitty," but returned to the school, like a cat to a comfortable home, when opportunity offered. Teaching is a distinct calling and many do make excellent teachers finally, but the present hap-hazard way of holding on to teachers without requiring definite results from their work is not seemly when taken in connection with such a practical profession as that of engineering. Teachers should be better paid and should be retained, as other workers are, only