> Nah. He's 84 years old and got fired for being a shitty teacher. It's more likely that he's a shitty teacher than an entire generation of people are suddenly fundamentally different from all humans before them, as you claimed.
Come on. Having different expectations is not being "fundamentally different from all humans before them." It's actually pretty normal, as far as "generations" go.
And if there's anything recent history should have taught you, is that "getting fired" for reason X, doesn't necessarily mean that reason X is actually true. It's not uncommon for a fired person to have been on the receiving end of unfair evaluation criteria, a bad manager, various kinds of prejudice, etc.
1) Humans decline mentally & physically as they age. Sucks, but it's true. This guy in his 30s was maybe a great teacher. That was in the 1970s. It's 2022. While I can't be certain, it's very likely he's not running on all cylinders. As mentioned, teaching is a really hard and demanding job. Statistically, it's very likely that he's just not up to the task anymore. People get old. Sorry.
2) Looking at it from a distance, if a group of students think your teaching style sucks so much that they put together a petition to get you to change it, that's just fundamentally a failure of your teaching style. He might want different students, but tough, these are the ones he's got. If he can't hack it with them then by definition he is a shitty teacher.
Combine the two and you get a pretty clear picture. Guy's not up to the job and the school and students will be better without him.
> Humans decline mentally & physically as they age. Sucks, but it's true. This guy in his 30s was maybe a great teacher. That was in the 1970s. It's 2022.
Sorry dude. In some ways that's true, in other ways that's not. IIRC, certain kinds of "mental agility" decrease as one ages, but that can be compensated for by increased experience and knowledge. Your comment also reads like classic techie ageism.
How much has undergrad organic chemistry changed since the 70s? My guess: not much. If the guy still knows his stuff (and he almost certainly does, given he wrote a widely used textbook), and he could teach well in the past, he can almost certainly teach it effectively now. IMHO, that can be hard to grasp for tech people, because so much of our knowledge is obsoleted quickly by various kinds of churn. I'm getting zero indication that the issue was that he was befuddled or anything like that.
> Looking at it from a distance, if a group of students think your teaching style sucks so much that they put together a petition to get you to change it, that's just fundamentally a failure of your teaching style. He might want different students, but tough, these are the ones he's got. If he can't hack it with them then by definition he is a shitty teacher.
That's bad reasoning, on the order of "he must be guilty, otherwise they wouldn't have arrested him." By your logic, it would be his failure as a teacher if he failed to teach a class of literal illiterates Organic Chemistry.
Come on. Having different expectations is not being "fundamentally different from all humans before them." It's actually pretty normal, as far as "generations" go.
And if there's anything recent history should have taught you, is that "getting fired" for reason X, doesn't necessarily mean that reason X is actually true. It's not uncommon for a fired person to have been on the receiving end of unfair evaluation criteria, a bad manager, various kinds of prejudice, etc.