Lectures

Scott McLemee of Intellectual Affaris on classroom lecturing:

Now, any competent teacher learns that you do what you gotta do to square the demands of presenting the course material with the limitations of students' previous knowledge and existing cognitive skills. Whatever works is, ipso facto, good. But The Pedagogy of Zaniness went way beyond pragmatism. Its outlook was one of abject surrender to "the World of Total Entertainment," as Philip Roth once called contemporary American culture.

Perhaps the most important lasting effect that education can have is to instill a lasting sense of how much you will never know - but could, if you worked at it. . . .

Scott goes on to discuss other lecture detractors before finding a proponent, Erving Goffman.

But some of Goffman's model applies just as well to the classroom lecture, r.i.p. He notes that a common experience of "joint tasks, theater performances, or conversations" is that people "get caught up and carried away into the special realm of being that can be generated by these engagements." And the audience of a lecture might become similarly engrossed. "However," he writes, "unlike games and staged plays, lectures must not be frankly presented as if engrossment were the controlling intent."

Take that, hipster doofus professor!

"Indeed," continues Goffman, "lectures draw on a precarious ideal: certainly the listerners are to be carried away so that time slips by, but because of the speaker's subject matter, not his antics' the subject matter is meant to have its own enduring claims upon the listeners apart from the felicities or infelicities of the presentation.

Scott argues in part that the lecture is under assault and is disappearing. As a veteran of UC Berkeley's 600-person classes, I can testify that so long as places like Berkeley are around, lectures will never be dead. I can't imagine classes with that many people being taught in any other way than through lectures (true, we also had 20-person discussion sections with grad students, but obviously this can't be implemented on a similar numerical basis with professors).

I'll say that no matter how big and unwieldy a 600-person class sounds, I usually found the lectures worthwhile. Maybe they were rarely inspiring, but they were also rarely useless. Such a large audience encouraged pragmatic thinking on both sides--the professor, if not a great speaker, at least had to make herself clear so that it was reasonable to expect that 600 people could understand what she had to say; we students were given our own choice: With so many people anonyminity was simple to come by, so it was really up to us if we wanted to pay attention and try to learn or doodle in our notebooks.

I guess what I'm saying is that lectures should be informative, but not necessarily amusing. So long as useful knowledge is being passed along, students should have good reason to listen, and if you're listening and taking notes you shouldn't be too bored out of your skull.

I appreciate the need for discussion, but I think that should be a separate activity, and, if I had to choose between lectures and discussions, I'm picking lectures. It's very simple: I will pay hundreds of dollars to hear a professor lecture. I will pay virtually nothing to hear my classmates discuss things. As bad as some professors are at lecturing, they are the trained professionals who have studied the material for years, and sometimes you just have to shut up and listen to them. Discussions can be good for mulling over a lecture and rehashing the material from different angles, but the fact remains (especially at the undergraduate level) that no matter how stodgy and uncool a professor is, the professor is the one who has the useful information.