College Students Critique Lectures

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College is not for everybody.  Some colleges aren't any good for anybody.  No college is good for everybody.  When lots of kids are railroaded to college, this is what happens.  Kids end up wanting to be entertained in college.  They think their professors should be Jerry Seinfeld, or whatever funny guy or gal the kids watch these days.

I was incited to write this post by this article that appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, which referred to a video on YouTube.

Meanwhile, Rick Santorum and Mit Romney ridicule President Obama for suggesting that most students should go into higher education (even if not traditional college).  Their point was that we must dignify all occupations, so that students who take on jobs that are currently considered undesirable will not feel looked down upon.  It seems to me that this would only happen if all jobs provide the same pay.  Conservatives, of course, are the last ones to look favorably on such a situation.

Nor would a conservative be happy paying big money to people such as, to take a random example, a store clerk, who has little higher education.  (These days many store clerks would have at least a bachelor's degree.)  Why?  because that would result in higher prices for consumer goods.

[It is right that society rediscovers the dignity of labor.  But it seems unfair to doom some citizens to low-income or low-satisfaction jobs based on their limited education.  This condemns both the worker and the job, because the job comes to be associated with people of low intelligence or low scholastic achievement, at the very least.  It seems more reasonable to me that people be given incentives to take on (presently) unpopular jobs on a part-time basis, or during a period of community service.  No job should be so terrible that it cannot be done for a brief stint.]

But what about this business about college professors not being sufficiently entertaining?

There seem to be two schools of thinking about this.

The Archimedes school of thinking goes as follows.  You're in college to educate yourself.  College is a place in which you can learn things, but no one is going to stuff your head with education while you relax and are entertained.  You've got to stuff your own head with the information.  What is the professor paid to do?  She is there to arrange for you to know what information is out there, to help connect the information and the reasoning together.  But not to do it for you.  So why should you pay big money for someone who is not going to do the learning for you?  I don't have an answer.  Society wants you to be educated, and so society should pay for it.  I don't think education is a consumer item.

The other school of thought is that it is indeed the professor's job to make the subject interesting.  If the professor can't do that, he should give up the profession, and allow someone more entertaining to take his or her place.  Unfortunately, the expectation of students tends to escalate, and there's no satisfying a student who has had a sequence of entertaining professors in the past.  You've gotta come on like Crazy Eddie, or junior is going to be bored.  I, even I have been accused of being too entertaining.  But I draw the line at a certain level of entertainment.  I make a joke or two, intersperse a set of difficult example with a little levity, but we grind on.  I get the students to go to the blackboard to work out examples, so that the class doesn't go to sleep.  I do make everyone move to the front of the class (so that all the empty seats are at the rear).  But that's about all I do.  I seldom or never use PowerPoint, unless there's an image or a diagram that I want the class to see.

Having said that ...
I have to confess that really terrible instructors --who are more likely to be teaching in institutions that have great difficulty in finding staff-- can use PowerPoint presentations as a crutch.

Even given the fact that faculty by and large reject the notion that it is their responsibility that the students should learn the material, faculty do feel that it is their duty to their subject to persuade the interested student of the value and the fascination of the topic that is being presented.  A professor of literature is either in that occupation because he or she loves literature, or because they're unable to find anything better to do.  It is an unfortunate school indeed that is the home for the latter.  But it is just a little unrealistic to expect that, if you put a mass of text on a slide and put it up on the screen, that the material will speak for itself.  Occasionally, it will.  Usually, it will not.

Often a professor will merely show a famous person explaining a topic on YouTube.  It seems somewhat crass, however, to expect that your entire series of lectures should be a sequence of YouTube clips.  The temptation in the social sciences is great, to outsource your entire course to YouTube, or a series of video clips from any source.  Many institutions, such as MIT, have put entire lecture series on the Web, and it is possible for the interested student to learn from these videos.  But then, what you have is distance learning.  The jury on distance-learning for undergraduates is still out.  However, some experts advocate using what is called blended learning, which is a combination of web-based or video-based learning, with face-to-face teaching.

A colleague of mine uses PowerPoint heavily.  But his slides have many blanks, which the students must fill in.  He hands out his slides, with the blanks, and as they go through the lesson, the students fill them in.  This keeps them minimally engaged, and provides opportunities for questions.  Questions form a great nucleus for real learning.

However, PowerPoint is most useful for pictorial or graphical information.  If your point requires a pictorial reinforcement, it is criminal not to present it!  So there are things that you should not do in PowerPoint (or equivalent presentation software, such as OpenOffice), and there are things that make great sense to do in that way.

So, I guess I'm saying that entertainment in class is not an entitlement.  Professors are allowed to be boring to anyone who has no business being in their class.  Sometimes a topic is just over your head, and you won't find the topic fascinating.  If you're held in thrall despite your unpreparedness, it is only delaying the inevitable moment when you should depart.  Sometimes a topic is too simple for a student, and boredom is unavoidable.  I don't know how to deal with that situation; evidently someone has decided you have to be bored in that class, and there's no help for it.

But some people are bored no matter where they go.  As a society, we should give these people an income, and keep them out of our hair.  Or there's always the Army, though they probably don't like wet blankets there, either!

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