Classes get easier/more interesting after weed out?

Darko21
Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:49:47 +0000

Many students have the misperception that it’s the professor’s job to teach you the material. That’s not true.

In college, it’s the instructor’s job to establish the concepts necessary to be mastered. It’s the instructor’s job to provide you with resources to master that material (usually a text book, a syllabus, lectures, and individual counseling in office hours). It’s the student’s job to learn the material given those resources. If a student is not mastering the material, it’s the student’s job to find additional resources (outside tutoring, etc).

Some students confuse teaching with being able to explain complex things in simple terms. Those are not the same thing. The reason? How well a professor explains something depends entirely on the person receiving the information. I can explain something using a complex proof, and a quarter the class will think the explanation was excellent, and the other three quarters will fall asleep. Similarly, I can use basic logic to explain something, and get to a quarter of the class. What’s even worse is the method also affects the student: some students learn from a graph, some students learn from auditory explanations, some learn from examples, and some learn from interaction. Some will learn from the Socratic method, some will learn from class discussions, some will learn from in-class exercises, while others will learn from a pure lecture. In short: there are 200 people in that room and to adequately explain something to all of them will probably require 50 different explanations. That time just doesn’t exist.

As a result, many professors in college get a bad rap. When students do not learn, they tend to blame the professor for being “a bad teacher”. That’s not true. It’s almost always actually the student’s fault for not learning the material. The professor probably has 200 students in his lecture hall - he can’t talk to every student individually, assess what the student knows or doesn’t know, then direct individual attention to that student. In a major class, sure, but not in an intro class. It’s your job to figure out how you learn, then to assess the resources provided by the professor to make sure you learn. It’s the instructor’s job to guide you (i.e. instructor you) on your process.



honestly I don’t feel like the professor lectures to teach us anything at all, he is just there to fail us. I would probably learn more by doing my own problems in the book and getting math help on a forum or something.

I’m keeping fingers crossed that other classes aren’t like that.