Who garners more respect as an educator:the high school teacher or college prof?

I respected my professors more

the professor on Gilligan's island got a lot of respect.

I should add that I'm asking because I'm getting experience as both. I taught high school for a while and now I'm in graduate school as well as a teacher of record.

I've noticed that no one in my cohort gives a shite about my prior teaching experience, and one of the professors said to me that teaching college is much different than teaching high school. It was said in the tone that teaching college is a much more difficult job. From my experience, teaching is teaching. Professors just don't give a shite about being good "teachers" in the sense that teaching is a craft. However, their ability to delve into deep and profound discussions on a subject far surpasses that of the high school teacher.

Many brilliant college professors absolutely suck as teachers.

In high school I felt like I was more intelligent than most of my teachers; in college I only felt like I was more intelligent than only a couple of my professors. Take a guess at who I respected more.

um professors...

Understanding what you teach is important. I will say sometimes a professor is too smart for his own good when it comes to teaching, but I would say professors are better teachers than high school teachers.

I respected my college professors more because I found them to have more knowledge, but I appreciated my high school teachers more for actually giving a shite and wanting their students to actually learn/understand the material.

I've done both. Teaching is a trade, like plumbing. You learn the mechanics of conveying information and controlling the learning environment over time. The ones who want to be good at it are always tweaking and revising their methods and materials.

That said, there's absolutely no substitute for content mastery and the quickest way to sink a ship is for it to become obvious to the class that you don't know the subject that well. On the other when the class becomes aware that you do, in fact, know the subject backwards and forwards, that can draw them into the course, get them interested and, in turn, make the transfer of information more efficient.

Good high school teachers probably have a greater chance to make an impact on students' lives. Unfortunately, the number of teachers who hold their students' feet to fire and have administrations that support them challenging the students is very, very low. I teach mostly freshmen and sophomores at an SEC school and we have to spend a good bit of time teaching them study skills and reading tactics just so they can complete the course - and these are generally students who were in the upper 20% of their high school classes. It's part of the reason why we put so much weight on the ACT/SAT -- the GPAs are now, for the most part, complete shite as a measure of your intellectual ability/achievement because they've watered them down for political/social/feel-good reasons.

I will say this, though: I'm not a huge fan of open-ended tenure because I've seen way too many of my colleagues get it and then sit on their asses for twenty years, using the shield of tenure as an excuse for acting like little bitches to the dean, president, and chancellor, kind of like a shite arse kid yelling at people from behind a fence.

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Who garners more respect as an educator:the high school teacher or college prof?

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If you're Walter White, it's a no brainer.