Re:The average college student today
by BobaFloutist on Sunday March 30, 2025 @09:39PM
(#43529786)
It's much easier to learn if you can ask questions and try (and fail) to make your own connections, and this has nothing to do with whether or not your own ideas and suggestions have any merit of their own.
I don't engage in class to show off or try to contribute, but because it's an incredibly valuable part of the learning process for me.
Questions are fine, unless they end up being a substitute for not preparing for class.
As a professor I had once put it, "This is difficult material. I don't expect you to understand it from just one lecture. You need to read the material before the lecture, but it will only be after you've struggled with the problem sets that I would expect you to understand it."
A class that is not interactive then doesn't have to be a class. It could be a book or a set of slides with an audio narration and that'd have the same result.
Teachers that can only read their notes and write stuff on a board without ever interacting are of the most useless kind. They're completely replaceable by course material.
Some subjects are conducive to the Socratic method but hard sciences and mathematics for instance are not. Ultimately you are trying to speedrun 500 years or so of discovery and research and while motivating problems often help, sometimes you just need to read the book, listen to the lectures and put in some effort.