A little debate

There's been a debate going on in the comments section of the "Glorious Five Year Plan" post about the theoretical vs. practical aspects of our course, and how its being taught. I had an epiphany last night.

Several of our professors have admitted that they have no experience teaching classes of the current size, and I think therein lies the problem with the teaching styles that we've been seeing. Reading off slides, speaking entirely in jargon...these are the actions not of incompetent professors, because talking with them one-on-one they know their stuff, but rather of workman trying to make due with substandard tools.

Most of these people are used to lecturing small groups of students, engaging them in direct discourse, and being able to explain the things they say. They are used to discussing examples, talking about theory, expanding on ideas. But how do you do that with 270 students? You can't. You have to use something that everyone can see, and make it as elementary as possible.

I think we scare them. On some basic, academic, primal level, we scare them. To use a kitchen example, its like staring down the gullet of a 250 person rush in a restaurant that normally never tops 70 covers a night. Full house, two or three sitting, night of full-bore crazy. And that's us.

The administration brought in more students than it could handle and shackled these professors down to classes bigger than many of my first year lectures. What do the professors do? They try to find some way to cope. Unfortunately, I get the impression that most of them aren't good group lecturers. They don't lecture crowds well without prepared speeches. They're used to a graduate level of teaching, wherein lecture is a two way street, and the students are looking to understand the information rather than simply absorb it as rote fact. They had to set up a course so that it could reach the lowest common denominator, because they couldn't afford to take the personal time to work with their students, resulting in days which are essentially first year pablum, whereas others are high theory that is actually applicable all around. You can really tell the content from the filler.

Simple fact of the matter is that none of our courses have exams. We don't need to absorb all of this rote information for future course use. Much of what we're learning is basic history as a filler for the professors not being able to instead fill the time the way it should be filled: in dialogue with the class.

We can see this in the INF100X series, where TAs, and sometimes profs, run up and down the aisles with microphones like we're on the set of Jerry Springer. That's no way to hold a dialogue with students. They cut off attempts at dialogue because the class is so big and everyone has to have a chance to ask their question. Asking questions of the Dean was like trying to ask a question in the White House press room: Everybody wanted to speak, only a few were allowed to.

That's the problem. The course size has sabotaged the professors as much as it has us. And I think we'd get many many times more out of the educational experience with smaller class sizes.

This doesn't make all the professors blameless. There are a few who, without a doubt, had a say in how this new program design came about. They confuse me greatly. But I have a hard time imagining that certain members of the faculty would have backed a plan for class sizes and teaching styles that seems so at odds with their own.

It feels sometimes like the Faculty itself is schizophrenic. It is inconsistent. It has little nagging voices in its head and pushes forwards with an irrational and illogical course of action because of them. It is internally conflicted, liable to just sit down in the gutter and argue with itself for hours while the student body watches on helplessly, trying to figure out what's going on. It cannot decide what it wants to be.