Personally I have not learned anything from math lectures since the end of high school. As I said before, lectures are bad for higher math. It's either too fast, then it's not understandable, or too slow, then it's boring. If it's written in a book, it's much better presented, than if it's written on a board live with a human hand. Using slides is mildly better, but slides are ugly, and why even use slides when you have a book?
And what's the point of taking notes? If the lecturer has prepared a lot about the lecture, to the point that the lecture notes are already done and so they could just refer to it during the lecture, why not print it out and give to the students so that they don't have to waste their time writing down their own lecture notes? To allow some idiosyncrasy for the notes, large margins can be put into the printed out notes so that the students can put in their own stuff there.
The only valid use of lectures is using it as a kind of "pre-alpha" release of whatever is in the lecturer's head. You know, the process of making knowledge can be written like this:
Things in somepony's head → things spoken out in a lecture → things written down in a paper → things in a book → things in some other's head
Lectures are pretty much the most wasteful way of using time for giving knowledge to others. Think about it, you speak once and the voice is gone as soon as you finish speaking. You write once and the mark stays forever until it's burned or lost. What's the point of even bothering to lecture? It makes no sense if the goal is to transmit knowledge, and not a ritual, a speech act.
I can think of only a few things that lecturing is useful for:
* For blind people, lectures might be easier than reading. Though I feel even for some of them, touch-reading is better than listening. Think about it, touch-reading is still 2-dimensional and unconstrained by time, so you can go back, go up, go down, go left, go right... Listening is 1-dimensional and stuck in time, so you can only go forwards helplessly.
* For story-telling. Some subjects are taught like stories, like psychology, history, and some politics. The theories and examples are just stories after stories and are thus very good for the lecture-style teaching, which is, after all, modelled after story-telling. But math? Physics? The advanced kinds of them are very inhuman, and very lacking in stories. To force them into a story-telling style is stupid and harmful for studying.
* For some essential body-language and demonstrations that are best understood when seen up-close. For example, the plate-trick is a really cool thing in geometry/group theory, and it's best seen and done with an actual plate! Some chemistry and physics demonstrations are also like that. But those are really few and far-between. And besides, they could be better done in tutorials, where full interactivity is allowed, rather than during lectures, where the lecturer drones on and on and the students can't interrupt more than a few times or else incur the infamy of "disrupting the flow".
* For discipline. Some people feel like they only learn during lectures. Well, good for them. Not me. I fall asleep during lectures.
* For pre-alpha builds. If the course material is soooo new that there are no textbooks available, and things are still inside research journals, folklores, and the heads of those few selected people who are the "initiated", then well, lectures might be the only way to go. But still, after the lectures, the lecture notes should be typed down and published so that others won't have to do the lecture again and can just read the lecture notes instead.
* For really amazing lecturers. Some lecturers, like professor Feynman, are so good at explaining, and so uninterested in writing down lecture notes beforehoof, that they just write down some basic points before lectures, too bare-bones to be called a lecture note, then just go to the lecture and wing it and deliver a beautiful lecture that people can actually learn from. But still, after the lectures, the lecture notes should be typed down and published, and the lecture recordings must also be published.
* For pre-alpha builds. If the course material is soooo new that there are no textbooks available, and things are still inside research journals, folklores, and the heads of those few selected people who are the "initiated", then well, lectures might be the only way to go. But still, after the lectures, the lecture notes should be typed down and published so that others won't have to do the lecture again and can just read the lecture notes instead.
* For really amazing lecturers. Some lecturers, like professor Feynman, are so good at explaining, and so uninterested in writing down lecture notes beforehoof, that they just write down some basic points before lectures, too bare-bones to be called a lecture note, then just go to the lecture and wing it and deliver a beautiful lecture that people can actually learn from. But still, after the lectures, the lecture notes should be typed down and published, and the lecture recordings must also be published.
I am not fighting against lectures because I'm a bad student. I have gotten full A+ in my college courses so far, without learning a thing in lectures. I rely entirely on lecture recordings, lecture notes, or best of all, textbooks. But this raises the question of why even take the courses at all?
Well there are plenty of useful things in college. Feedback and assignments are good, some question-and-answer sessions are good. Too bad that they only take second-place, with lectures, this hidebound institution, taking up the majority of what a course is "about". A course is not about lectures at all. It's about learning, and lectures are bad for learning (at least in math and physics).
So how to fix this mess?
To begin with, recognize that there's a serious problem with lecturing.
Then, try some other method of teaching. If there's a good textbook, just follow the textbook and forgo lectures entirely. The teaching would be made of these parts: self-learning through textbook, tutorials to discuss and do question-answer, some
If there's an okay textbook, the lecturer could write their own notes to annotate and expand on points that are missing in the textbook.
If there's no textbook, well, then the lecturer would have to lecture, or write the lecture notes in full. And the lectures should be recorded as well for posterity. Publish a textbook, publish the recordings, publish the notes. Don't keep the knowledge esoteric and hidden. Publish it and save others the trouble of going to lectures again!
To begin with, recognize that there's a serious problem with lecturing.
Then, try some other method of teaching. If there's a good textbook, just follow the textbook and forgo lectures entirely. The teaching would be made of these parts: self-learning through textbook, tutorials to discuss and do question-answer, some
If there's an okay textbook, the lecturer could write their own notes to annotate and expand on points that are missing in the textbook.
If there's no textbook, well, then the lecturer would have to lecture, or write the lecture notes in full. And the lectures should be recorded as well for posterity. Publish a textbook, publish the recordings, publish the notes. Don't keep the knowledge esoteric and hidden. Publish it and save others the trouble of going to lectures again!
Consider the inverted classroom model. I took some physics courses under the model and they were so great!
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