Classes get easier/more interesting after weed out?

G.P.Burdell
Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:03:25 +0000

I believe the problem must be motivation since people talk about studying every night of the week and I never really study until the tests come around.



People like to exaggerated how much they study. With most classes, you don’t need to study until right before a test (though it doesn’t hurt to read along in the textbook).



So he gives homework and tests and a final, and I guess it is implied that you study for the tests by doing the homework, although he doesn’t really teach how to do the homework.



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.



I guess my question then is are these the only classes that are like that (does it get a lot better?).



In smaller classes, professors get more feedback on how students are learning and where the challenges lie. If a large number of students have a problem, you try to explain it a different way. In large classes, you can’t see that. So what you do is lecture to the median student in the room.

This is a problem in all engineering colleges: the entire university has to take a few classes (Calc sequence, CS, physics, and chemistry, usually) so those classes tend to be large. When students get to major courses, they get much smaller (at Tech, around 30 students or less). The private schools might tend to “hide” this issue for the purpose of USNWR rankings, but in my experience, it’s an issue everywhere (the exception are the very, very small schools, i.e. <1000 undergrads, that tend to not have engineering).