How entertaining do your kids think a professor needs to be?

garland · October 22, 2012, 8:35pm

In my comp classes today, we were reading an essay written by a college professor lamenting the fact that, in his view, college classes were expected to follow a customer paradigm, and that increasingly he felt he was expected to entertain (very glib characterization of essay.) So my point is not to discuss the essay (but if you want to read it, it’s Mark Edmundson, <a href=“https://www.purchase.edu/sharedmedia/advisingcenter/edmundson%20-%20on%20the%20uses%20of%20a%20liberal%20education.pdf[/url]”>https://www.purchase.edu/sharedmedia/advisingcenter/edmundson%20-%20on%20the%20uses%20of%20a%20liberal%20education.pdf</a> ).

But rather, what I’d like to ask those of you with high school or college age students–what’s their take on this, as far as you know, and also, what’s yours?

In my classes, full of mostly new freshmen–bright, engaging young people–they maintained, almost unanimously, that they agreed that entertainment was a part of what they expected, or, at the very least, it was up to the professor to keep them interested. I asked who lost out if they didn’t learn because they “lost interest,” and though they agreed it was them, they felt it was “the professor’s fault.”

This is a comparatively new approach from students–as recently as a few years ago, I would not have heard this argued so baldly. Students in the past have said it’s hard to concentrate if they’re “bored” but I haven’t heard it till recently so totally put on the instructor’s shoulders to make them be interested. It feels new-ish to me, and honestly, a little disturbing.

The funny thing is, when they saw that I was taken aback by their position, they all assured me that they liked my class (as if that was my end goal.) Well, of course anyone would like their class to be enjoyed, but that’s not my goal; my goal is to help them become good writers. But that goal entails lots of critical thinking practice, which means lots of freewheeling discussion, so yeah, it’s easier to stay awake in here.

but if I had to teach chemistry (they’re mostly chem majors and share a chem class), then bells and whistles might be rarer, because there’d be a body of knowledge, some of it very challenging, that needed to be understood, whether the student found it “entertaining” or not.

I do know that in the past, we would have been laughed out of school if we’d voiced those opinions. It was up to us to learn, not up to the prof to entertain.

So I’m wondering if you’d heard this, or something different? and would be interested in opinions of those closer to these age students than my own kids are.

romanigypsyeyes · October 23, 2012, 1:28am

As a student, I don’t expect my teachers to be entertaining. I do hear students say that they don’t like a prof because he/she’s “boring”. Personally, I don’t get it. I want my profs to be knowledgeable and respectful. If I wanted a show, I’d stay home and watch tv.

Obviously classes are more fun when the professor tries to be entertaining. It keeps the class engaged and is, IMO, a better way to get everyone involved and thus do more collaborative learning (discussions).

missypie · October 23, 2012, 7:52am

In law school, my standard was that if they kept me awake, I liked their class. Entertainment was a bonus, but I also didn’t mind taking the obnoxious controversial guy, because I stayed awake to see what kind of outrageous things would come out of his mouth next. Hearing a dull quiet guy drone on about securities regulations for three hours at a stretch was a special type of torture.

Not every subject matter lends itself to “entertainment” but I would hope that the teacher shows through their delivery why the subject is so cool/important that the teacher has devoted his or her life to teaching it. (And teachers who manage to make history classes boring should really rethink their occupation.)

BCEagle91 · October 22, 2012, 9:20pm

One class at my son’s school was on iOS Programming. You came up with a project idea for the course, watched the online videos to learn and met with the professor for 15 minutes per week to discuss your project.

Ideally, students learn how to learn on their own in college with a little assistance from professors, textbooks, discussions and other materials. Being entertaining isn’t required for learning. It may help learning for some people but in life, sometimes you have to learn how to do things without being entertained. Learning to fix a flat tire on your own comes to mind.

kiddie · October 23, 2012, 8:24am

When a teachers shows their passion and enthusiasm for a subject I think it goes a long way towards “entertaining” their students. Even the driest topics can be explained in a way which keeps kid’s attention (my daughter has had math/science teachers who were some of her favorites with their dry wit.) Entertaining to me is not telling jokes but rather presenting material in a way that leaves an impression (which then makes remembering it easier for the student).

mathmom · October 22, 2012, 9:20pm

I actually found the professors who took entertaining seriously a little disturbing (the comp sci prof who demonstrated what an algorithm was by trying to come up with instructions for a computer to diaper a baby, or the physics professor who shot a stuffed animal monkey on stage). OTOH I do remember those lectures and what points they were illustrating. I despised teachers who dryly read from notes and ones who had nothing to add to what was in the textbooks. You don’t learn if you are falling asleep in class, and while I don’t think you need edutainment, I do think the professor - especially in a lecture class - needs to be engaging.

Emaheevul07 · October 23, 2012, 8:54am

I didn’t expect to be entertained when I went to class, but the classes that were entertaining were naturally more engaging and I think I got more out of them. That didn’t mean that the professor had to be making jokes or anything, just that they considered how to present the material in a way that was engaging. I would say 99% of my professors did that. I think there’s a difference between expecting a professor to be engaging and expecting a professor to crack jokes, I am not sure what we’re really talking about here.

I did have two professors who were BRILLIANT and extremely well known and accomplished in their fields, but I struggled to learn much from them at all. Their lectures were three hours long, had no visuals at all, and were just long, drawn out sentences that ran together-- and both were extremely difficult subjects. I couldn’t even figure out how to organize my notes into sections. I tried really hard but just could not get very much out of those lectures. If they had put a bit more thought into how to make the information more digestible it would have gone a long way for me… is that their job? I guess I don’t know. I can see why a “customer paradigm” would bother a professor, but it also doesn’t seem like a great use of anybody’s time to stand up and say whatever without considering the audience and what is going to help them retain the information the best.

sseamom · October 23, 2012, 10:26am

Emaheevul07 says it for me. I think engaging is important, especially when the topic is a dry one, but I don’t think entertaining, as in putting on a show, is necessary.

The worst prof I had literally recited what was in the text that we’d read the night before, quizzed us on that a few times that semester, then tested us on all of it for the final. I could have gotten an A without ever setting foot in class, and I often skipped it. I learned nothing, and it’s a shame, because4 it was an upper-level sociology class that could have been really interesting. The best teacher I had not only taught us journalism writing but infused his classes with stories of his own experiences to illustrate the topic of the day. The stories weren’t always “entertaining” but they WERE engaging, and that and all the difference.

blueiguana · October 23, 2012, 11:01am

My son will talk about instructors that he finds quirky or interesting. He has never complained about boring, but has commented a couple of times on being lectured directly off of powerpoint or from the textbook…word for word. He became pretty adept in high school at determining what he was going to get from an instructor and finding resources to fill in the blanks, be it study groups, online tutorials, other study materials, etc. This may be more the approach and expectations of an engineering major. I don’t believe he looks for entertainment in thermodynamics. Now, if he were taking Advanced Studies in Medieval Literature he may find a modest amount of interest/passion on the part of the instructor during lectures helpful and appreciate it a great deal.

garland · October 23, 2012, 11:18am

thanks for the comments–definitely agree that engaging is better (I try to be myself.) But let me ask this, if a prof drily presented information that was hard to absorb, and it would take a lot of effort on the part of the student to do so, would you say that it was the professor’s “fault” that the student couldn’t stay awake/ couldn’t pay attention/ didn’t do well? I think that’s what sounded different to me (lord knows, I had my share of teachers who i thought presented in less than engaging ways). but it would never have occurred to me (or my kids, who are half a generation older than these students) to say, directly, that it was not their responsibility to learn if the class wasn’t “interesting,” and it was the professor’s fault if they didn’t.

mathmom · October 23, 2012, 11:49am

I think ultimately students are responsible for learning something, but that professors who make no effort to engage their students are a serious problem for which there ought to be some consequences. I do think it’s possible that the soundbite/video game generation may have a harder time concentrating. I can certainly understand a professor feeling impatient with students that think they need more entertaining than was necessary in the past. (I think we have changed - I can barely read* Last of the Mohicans *for example, great plot, but it’s so long-winded!)

This reminds me of this anecdote. Architecture lectures are usually IMO pretty hard to ruin. You run through slides of a bunch of pretty buildings and say something about them. So the professor - Kenneth Frampton - brilliant man and brilliant lecturer - gets up to talk about “The Panopticon” (buildings designed where a central point can observe the rest of the building - popular in prison and library design.) So he puts up this image for his first slide and starts to speak: [File:Panopticon.jpg</a> - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Panopticon.jpg]File:Panopticon.jpg”>File:Panopticon.jpg - Wikipedia) An hour later he hasn’t changed the slide. His last line? “I bet you wouldn’t have stayed if you had realized I was only going to show one slide.” We all chuckled, but we knew we had seen a master.

sseamom · October 23, 2012, 11:51am

Have you ever seen those commercials for Visine with Ben Stein drily lecturing about how it works? The monotone, the stand in one place recitation, the wooden aspect? If a prof is like that-yes, I would blame him/her for being unable to do anything but state the facts and not do anything more than a book would do. If I can’t stay awake because the prof is so useless, then YES, it’s his/her fault for not learning how to be a better teacher.

I took freshman chemistry 1 & 2 for science majors even though I was not a science major, because I’d enjoyed it in HS. It was held in a large lecture hall, and there was a lot of dry material in a short span of time. But the prof-and it WAS a full prof, not a grad student, somehow made it clear, and more importantly, INTERESTING. It wasn’t EASY and it wasn’t ENTERTAINING. But it was ENGAGING. Had he just stood up there woodenly droning on, none of us would have learned as much. We could only have done so much ourselves.

There was a very long thread on CC recently about the quality, or lack thereof, of teachers in the public school system. At least they GET some instruction on HOW to teach and reach kids. College instructors may be experts in their fields, but they are not taught how to TEACH what they know. Why is it the fault of public school teachers when kids fail but college profs get off scott free when they aren’t any good at reaching their students? Students have to make the effort to absorb the topics, but their teachers can and should know how best to present it.

roshke · October 23, 2012, 11:58am

I might call that scenario contributory negligence. Of course, at the college level the ultimate responsibility of the student is to learn the material. But if the faculty member is a poor communicator, who can’t effectively engage and teach, then that person isn’t particularly well suited to his or her job, IMO. Teachers are in the position to influence and encourage - the reverse can be true as well.

missypie · October 23, 2012, 2:44pm

You make an excellent point. Whenever I hear folks say that the solution to the shortage of HS math and science teachers is to bring actual scientists and mathematicians into the HS classrooms, I always think that could be an utter disaster. The brightest person on the planet may be totally unable to explain Algebra to a 9th grader.

missypie · October 23, 2012, 2:49pm

I will say that I feel cheated out of a decent science education. Every single science teacher I had could have stepped out of Central Casting for Boring Science Teacher. When I think about science I wonder how it is possible to make it boring - it’s how everything works! and grows! and is made! But yet, year after year, my teachers managed to suck all of the life out of the subject.

cobrat · October 23, 2012, 3:57pm

I find that amusing considering my worst K-12 teachers happen to be those in middle/high school who emphasized bragged about their Ed school credentials* while the best ones were those with PhDs/professional grad degrees like MDs who taught much more similarly to some of my better undergrad instructors who never attended Ed school.

This isn’t helped by having several teacher friends…including a longtime former post-college roommate who attended top-5 Ed schools for their teaching credentials and found most of what they learned was too theoretical, “faddish”, too much teaching to the LCD culture/Harrison Bergeron mentality, and otherwise irrelevant to the realities of the K-12 classroom.

This isn’t helped by common knowledge…including some I’ve known firsthand that far too many Ed school students were academic laggards…like a friend’s elementary ed majoring Ex-GF who struggled to complete even a remedial math course covering basic 9th grade algebra to fulfill her school’s math requirement.

<ul>
<li>This was one major factor in why few classmates…especially top students wanted to consider teaching or regarded Ed School credentials very highly.</li>
</ul>

garland · October 23, 2012, 4:15pm

Interestingly, when I was discussing this class discussion with my H (HS teacher), he said: this is what I’ve been telling you–we saw this coming a few years ago, and we’re partly to blame.

He’s a, by all reports, extremely engaging science teacher (background is medicine, though he did get teaching credentials when he career-switched.) His classes are hands-on, innovative, critical-thinking based. Yet except for a motivated minority, students balk at hard work–no reading of textbook, helpless in the face of complex experiments–a general air of “I can’t do this, but I need an A” which the administration abets–if they’re not doing well, something has to give–test standards, weight of homework, how many times they can try something–. Constant emails from parents about why their student doesn’t have an A. (“read the textbook” is not considered germaine advice.) A general air of passive–“make this happen for me.”

(this is a teacher who’s at the school till at least 6 most days, who goes in on the weekend to prepare the experiements, who’s up till midnight planning classes, etc. Loads of time for students to get extra help, ask questions, etc.)

And he’ll say the same thing as me–they’re nice, pleasant people. But the learned helplessness is palpable.

Look, I’m in favor of engaged profs, but I don’t think classes can always be entertainment–which is what my students were talking about (I asked who read the chem text from the class they were talking about; few hands went up).

I honestly think that many students lately think that merely being in college itself should make learning (and A’s) enter their minds. (after all, they’re the paying “customer”). I know I sound like one of those generational lamentors, but what I’m describing (and maybe not well), is a noticeable change in student approach to learning, both in HS and in college. Not all students, of course, but a lot.

(I think the ones in the past who were less personally invested in actually learning were also less vocal about asserting their right to that position and expecting success anyway–maybe that’s the real difference.)

romanigypsyeyes · October 23, 2012, 4:20pm

I think where I draw the line is when a prof clearly does not want to be there. I had a teacher like this in high school, but luckily none in college. It made it very difficult for us to absorb anything. He seemed to purposely teach in a dry fashion that was way over our heads (intro to chem class). It also made it very difficult to go and talk to him after class.

So dry lectures are perfectly fine as long as there at least seems to be some attempt to talk to the students, not just to a wall. I’m not sure if that makes sense. But it does seem to rub off on you if the person talking to you doesn’t want to be there either.

garland · October 23, 2012, 4:51pm

romani–that makes sense. Glad you only ran into that once! :)

romanigypsyeyes · October 23, 2012, 5:01pm

I think I’ve been incredibly lucky :). Or I just don’t remember any other dry ones lol.

How entertaining do your kids think a professor needs to be?

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