Some Professors
and teachers go by the book and some don’t.
With regard to learning, attending lecture is a poorer way to learn that
actually sitting down with the textbook reading it for yourself. Yes, some are visual learners, some are
auditory learners, and some learn through feeling, but actually reading the
material is key.
At college,
if you are a dedicated student, chances are that you don’t have a lot of extra
time to spend on activities such as lecture, where the lecture is simply a
reiteration of written material, which is either available or not available. There is a better way to learn than the old
fashioned way of listening to a Professor ramble on for roughly 90mins each
class, and that is by reading the text book and asking questions. Some professors lecture on material that
might as well be written down, and shame should be placed on them for not
making that material available in written for written form is a better way of
learning than lecture. I won’t go so far
as to say that being able to listen is unimportant. Indeed, being able to listen if one is a
doctor of medicine is often paramount, such that he or she is able to absorb
what a patient has to say. However, instead
of lecturing on material not in the test, I suggest that Professors get creative
about ways students can collaborate socially with the material which might be
facilitated by a Professor. Essentially,
what I am suggesting is that Professors stop lecturing, and start working on
facilitating students how they may collaborate together to better understand
the material.
By the time
students get to college, students should all know how to read, and it is such
that reading the material is more important because it opens up the logic and
reasoning centers of the brain, while listening to someone lecture often causes
those logic and reasoning centers to shut down, such that while a student may
be able to remember them, a student will generally be unable to synthesize
ideas if he or she has learned via teacher/professor or television. This is also one reason why I feel it is so
important for me to blog this material because people that can read may be able
to not just become parrots of me in a professorial way, but that my readers are
able to take what I have to say such that it becomes inspirational.
