Meanwhile, back at the classroom, the lecture is drawing to a close. Just as the bell rings, the lecturer, if he’s a really smooth operator, comes to the end of a sentence, a paragraph, a nice neat unit. He lays down his last piece of chalk — he knows exactly how many pieces the lecture will take — picks up his precious lecture notes, and goes out. The students, tired but happy, rise up and follow after him. Their heads are empty, but their notebooks are full. Their necks are a little tired; it’s been like a sort of vertical tennis match: board, notebook, board, notebook. But other than that, everything is all right. Any student will tell you, “I never had any trouble with the course until the first examination.” There hasn’t been a chance to ask any questions, but that’s all right; they haven’t any questions to ask, anyhow. They’ve been so busy writing hey haven’t had time to think about what was being said; it ran in their ears and out their pencils.
In a total coincidence, the farther away a class was from this shit and closer to his alternative system, the more I liked it, got knowledge from it, and got better grades.
I never had a lecture class in college. The curriculum was based more around discussion and participation. A couple history classes were mostly the professor giving a speech, but you were always allowed to interrupt with any questions on the subject at hand and he would answer them.
Just sitting in a huge lecture hall with some guy droning on down at the bottom would have been a surefire way of falling alseep for me.
A lot of my classes (especially the Math requirements classes for CS) were exactly as you described, except with the added bonus that the person giving the lecture was a high level grad student who was brilliant but not a native English speaker and despite being technically fluent in English he (I’m not being sexist, they were simply all men in my case) would invariably have one of the thickest, most hard to interpret accents you’ve ever heard. This was especially fun in math classes where most discussion is symbolic and/or uses words (eg. “eigenvector”) that you don’t hear much in the real world.
Most of my classes are in the Lecture setting, but all of them allow and encourage people to speak up and ask questions…
However, I completely agree with the quoted, as a lot of the time it just lecture lecture lecture hey wait that doesn’t make sense shit we’re onto another topic already lecture lecture lecture.
Its not just the professors job though, as most students now-a-days would rather skip classes or just not pay attention (Myself included)
Lecture hall classes are pretty useless, but in my experience they are primarily used for general stuff people have to take (such as the liberal arts requirements) and not for degree specific courses. The real classes were taught by the actual professor and were much smaller. At least at both schools I attended, one of which was a large state university, that was how it worked.
I went all the time because I didn’t have cable. Also, class was full of hot bitches. No offense to the ladies, I’m sure there were a few topnotch cocksmen too, but I wasn’t on the look out for that.
If it’s some lit-er-a-teure class, then sure discuss away because it’s all just mental masturbation. But maths are not generally a subject where discussion should occur in the classroom. The focus is, and should be, on delivery of new material from the board to the notebook, with extra time available out of class to discuss problems with the professor either through email or office hours.
I mean, really, when was the last time someone had an insightful thought about integrals that the entire class absolutely must hear? I prefer that my fellow classmates shut their fucking pie holes so that we can all leave earlier with more shit done.
In fact, if I could go around gagging people, I’d be even happier!
As highly amusing as your dismissal of literature is, let’s skip over that. :)
As he points out in the essay, if the goal of classtime is to deliver information to a notebook, there’s an existing, more efficient way to do this - it’s called “reading the book.”
I received a math degree from OU in Norman and his insights are dead-on with my experience. My single most boring class in all of college, compared to how interesting the subject material should have been, was Linear Algebra II. It consisted of 15 people in a room watching the professor demonstrated how to solve one type of problem per class, in virtually the same manner as the textbook. The situation was wildly net negative compared to not going to class at all and just reading the textbook. The time and money there was a total waste. The especially exasperating part is the subject is fascinating when you look at the problems you can apply it to and how the underlying theory translates into problem-solving and modeling power, but oh no, that’s something that ironically only the textbook got around to discussing.
Here’s the fun part, though - as a student, there’s nothing you can do about it. When the professor does that, it’s difficult to get a good grade unless you attend every single class, even though it logically should make no difference. Why? The professor inevitably ends up dictacting a slightly to completely different version of the textbook to you at spoken word speed. So unless you have a spy to tell you the relative levels of emphasis to let you guess up focus areas for the exam, and this is more difficult to get right than you’d think, you focus on the wrong areas, and you consistently get a B. So the game-theory equilibrium forces you and every other student to throw precious hours of your life down a well in a kabuki dance which has little to no correlation with skill demonstration or learning.
By contrast, a few of the last-year math classes didn’t do this, and as a result they were really interesting. They pretty much did what this essay writer recommends, without calling it out as an explicit approach - you learn the bookkeeping and basics in your own time, you discuss high-level whys and interesting implications in class. Amusingly, the single most fascinating class I had like this was something in Chinese history, mostly because of the class format having little to none of the bullshit. Yeah, those “soft” subjects, such dumbasses compared to the vaunting engineering program.
I’m just stupid (no surprise!), but I almost always found in class lectures in my classes (math or otherwise) very helpful, and not only for emphasis reasons (though that too). However, most of my professors were open to questions during their lectures too, but the amount of questions varied generally.
If I would have rarely attended my classes, I would have gotten Cs or failed them.
The only time I found lectures not useful is one time a professor would not slow down, no matter how many times students asked, and actually got visibly annoyed and just about started calling people names. What was weird, is he was the nicest guy if you had questions at his office. Heh.
I also find, that even if technically they are presenting the same material as from the textbook, they often present it in a slightly different way, that’s useful to people that learn visually (as text books are known to skip of parts of a problem or idea they assume are obvious). Of course it’s obvious to the writer, they’re generally masters of the subject. Heh.
I thought this was what the quote in the OP was indicating. Is it meant to be an indictment of ANY lecture? Are professors just meant to hang around chatting with students in class?
Lectures allow you to get more information across. Of course, students should ALWAYS be free to ask questions. And the professor should always stop from time to time to take them. I personally, use a lot of Socratic method in my teaching. Instead of a straight lecture, I try to get students to participate. However, it doesn’t always work. Sometimes, students simply refuse to talk. Then I have to lecture. Even then, I don’t rush, and I don’t just recite info. I explain the readings, and I offer examples, and I even try to make things humorous, so they will stay awake and listen. Works well enough for me.
My favorite class so far has been the Manifold Theory class wherein the professor would get stuck working examples that came directly out of the book. “Stuck” like stop for 10 minutes and finally move on after saying “I’m not sure how to finish this. Moving on…”
Yeah, some professors are just bad educators. For instance, I’ve had two classes with this one guy. He’s a foreign statistician who worked for the blah blah blah great credentials blah. His econometrics class was exactly what you described (which is doubly hilarious, considering), with the guy up at the board fucking around with simple problems, making mistakes and then giving up after having wasted like twenty minutes.
And now I’m in a policy class he’s teaching, and it is equally terrible. It’s to the point that he’s been asking for tips on teaching! Again, the same problem – he’ll sit up at the board tinkering with example numbers for simple problems, making error after error, and then the class ends. He also isn’t preparing his own material, just using stuff that came with the textbook – so in addition to being foreign (and thus not having been immersed in the intricacies of the American system at an early age), he’s also not doing his homework!
I mean, really, at some point you just want to slap these guys and be like, dude, stop wasting my daylight!
And some professors are great. I had an Intermediate Micro professor (also foreign) who lectured with great gusto and managed much of the class online – including the posting of detailed notes and homework assignments using a program that showed you the solutions and the work required to find them after they were turned in. He did the same thing with tests, which was even better. The best class I’ve ever taken, even though it was hard as shit.
I really think discussion classes suck. I’m not having money hoovered away so that I can sit around and listen to other poorly educated people talk. I’m paying to have an expert in a field aid me in gaining better understanding, be it of Renaissance drama (I dunno why, but I’ve taken four classes on the subject) or Economics or Computer Science.
Discussion can be effective in the right context. In an upper level course, where you have majors, or at least a lot of people who know the subject, they are great. In fact, I’m teaching a course on social and political philosophy right now that is fantastic in this regard. Even so, I spend a good bit of class time directly covering readings and explaining them. So it’s not JUST discussion. I think discussion is best used as a supplement. It allows you to get into some depth that goes beyond just learning what a writer (or a professor) has to say on the subject. Students can often provide very interesting perspectives and examples to help clarify things. Discussions can also let the professor know what parts of the material students aren’t grasping as well. It’s sometimes hard to do that in a lecture because we tend to get the material pretty well. It’s easy to forget that what you take for granted might be completely new to some or all of the class.
These types of classes at my college were mostly relegated to the freshman and sophomore level of basic courses of study. Listening and comprehending have to be learned if you are to learn for yourself. Anyone sitting there writing the lecture down word for word isn’t learning anything. As far as I can tell, no class I’ve ever attended required sitting there re-writing everything that you could have read in the book. I found it useful to jot down notes that may not have been mentioned by the required reading, and use those notes as a guideline for what the teacher taught and expected me to know.
By junior and senior year, you are most likely much more involved in the courses you take, offering feedback and frequently talking in front of groups of people. The organizational guidelines to your thought comprehension and explanation should have been learned during those beginner courses.
There’s no avoiding lectures, because professors have got to tell you things if you’re ever going to get that degree. It’s the note-taking that’s the problem. When I was in college (and people are always surprised to learn that I went to college, for some reason — a few are even surprised to remember I went to college!) I saw students trying to learn with their notebooks instead of their noggins, and learning without a noggin, trust me, it doesn’t work so well.
