静脉血管瘤>定格青春College Lectures is Anybody Listening
By
David Daniels
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Preview
College students are doodling in their notebooks or gazing all off into space as their instructor lectures for fifty minutes. What is wrong with this picture? Many would say that what is wrong is the students. However, the educator and author David Daniels would say that the lecture itlf is the problem. As you read this article, e if you agree with Daniels's analysis of lectures and their place in a college education.
A former teacher of mine, Robert A. Fowkes of New York University, likes to tell the story of a class he took in Old English while studying in Germany during the 1930s. On the first day the professor strode up to the blackboard, looked through his notes, coughed, and began, “Guten Tag, Meine Damen und Herren”(“Good day, ladies and gentlemen”). Fowkes glance
d around uneasily. He was the only student in the cour.
虾饺子Toward the middle of the mester, Fowkes fell ill and misd a class. When he returned, to Fowkes’s astonishment, the professor began to deliver not the next lecture in the quence but the one after. Had he, in fact, lectured to an empty hall in the abnce of his solitary student? Fowkes thought it perfectly possible.
Today American colleges and universities (originally modeled on German ones) are under strong attack from many quarters. Teachers, it is charged, are not doing a good job of teaching, and the students are not doing a good job of learning. American business and industries suffer from unenterprising, uncreative executives educated not to think for themlves but to mouth outdated truisms the rest of the world has long discarded. College graduates lack both basic skills and general culture. Studies are conducted and reports are issued on the status of higher education, but any changes that result either are largely cosmetic or make a bad situation wor.
冬天的形容词One aspect of American education too ldom challenged is the lecture system. Professo
制作小发明rs continue to lecture and students to take notes much as they did in the thirteenth century, when books were so scarce and expensive that few students could own them. The time is long overdue for us to abandon the lecture system and turn to methods that really work.
To understand the inadequacy of the prent system, it is enough to follow a single imaginary first-year student--let’s call her Mary--through a term of lectures on, say, introductory psychology (although any other subject would do as well). She arrives on the first day, and looks around the huge lecture hall, taken a little aback to e how large the class is. Once the hundred or more students enrolled in the cour discover that the professor never takes attendance (How can he? Calling the role would take far too much time), the class shrinks to a less imposing size.
Some days Mary sits in the front row, from where she can watch the professor read from a stack of yellowed notes that em nearly as old as he is. She is bored by the lectures, and so are most of the other students, to judge by the way they are nodding off or doodlin
g in their notebooks. Gradually she realizes the professor is as bored as his audience. At the end of each lecture he asks, ‘Are there any questions?’ in a tone of voice that makes it plain he would much rather there weren’t. He needn’t worry--the students are as relieved as he is that the class is over.
早孕期
Mary knows very well she should read an assignment before every lecture. However, as the professor gives no quizzes and asks no questions, she soon realizes she needn’t prepare. At the end of the term she catches up by skimming her notes and memorizing a list of facts and dates. After the final exam, she promptly forgets much of what she has memorized. Some of her fellow students, disappointed at the impersonality of it all, drop out of college altogether. Others, likes Mary, stick it out, grow resigned to the system and await better days when, as juniors and niors, they will attend smaller class and at last get the kind of personal attention real learning requires.
I admit this picture is overdrawn--most universities supplement lecture cours with discussion groups, usually led by graduate students; and some class such as first-year
English, are always relatively small. Nevertheless, far too many cours rely principally or entirely on lectures, an arrangement much loved by faculty and administrators but scarcely designed to benefit the students.
One problem with lectures is that listening intelligently is hard work. Reading the same material in a textbook is a more efficient way to learn becau students can proceed as slowly as they need to until the subject matter becomes clear to them. Even simply paying attention is very difficult: people can listen at a rate of four hundred to six hundred words a minute, while the most spirited professor talks at scarcely a third of that speed. This time lag between speech and comprehension leads to daydreaming. Many students believe years of watching television have shortened their attention span, but their real problem is that listening attentively is much harder than they think.
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