John Lydon
associate professor
Department of Psychology
Carrie M Derick Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching & Supervision
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At McGill we are privileged to teach extremely bright, motivated students. However, they are trying to navigate their way through a world in which the traditional signposts of cultural values and norms have given way to diversity, relativism and value-free indifference.
At the university, they find professors who have retreated to learning more and more about less and less. In the classroom, technical wizardry is advocated in the vain hope that it will fend off obsolescence. What do professors have to give that is of enduring value?
Our mission is to teach students how knowledge and reason may illuminate their understanding of themselves and their physical and social world. Our students feel intense pressure to perform more than to learn. We feel the increasing burden of administrative tasks. These pressures divert our attention away from the essentials of education.
One practical response is to significantly increase the number of teaching assistants -- people who provide invaluable support to both professors and students -- while obtaining experience and much needed financial support for themselves.
