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I haven’t ever learned any­thing sig­nif­i­cant in a lec­ture the­ater. There are so many lit­tle things about them that make them the worst pos­si­ble envi­ron­ment to learn in. I for one, have learned next to noth­ing in a lec­ture the­ater, and while almost every class I have taken has had at least one lec­ture a week, I would say I’ve attended at most thirty-three per­cent of them, and actu­ally retained use­ful knowl­edge from twenty per­cent of that thirty-three per­cent. I would say one of the best things they have been used for in my first two years of uni­ver­sity is meet­ing like-minded stu­dents who also agree that this time could be bet­ter spent study­ing, or eat­ing, or sleep­ing, or any­thing but sit­ting in a bor­ing lec­ture pre­tend­ing I’m learn­ing. Now, maybe I over exag­ger­ated a lit­tle bit when I said before that I’ve learn­ing noth­ing sig­nif­i­cant in a lec­ture the­ater, but in actu­ally its the fact that I’ve learned from a extremely small per­cent­age of them, a per­cent­age that is viewed by some peo­ple “too small” for a learn­ing institution.

I’ll admit, this topic spawned from a head turn in one of my recent use­less lec­tures, and was meant to be a rant more then any­thing. I was sit­ting in the back of the lec­ture the­atre (which I gen­er­ally do when the pro­fes­sor is use­less, which is *gasp* about 66% of the time, see the math­e­mat­i­cal cor­re­la­tion?), and I was mind­ing my own busi­ness talk­ing amongst my friends (Jesse and Hor­atiu), when a stu­dent turns his head and tells us to be quiet. Are you fuck­ing kid­ding me? There is a rea­son we sit in the back. Its to talk amongst our­selves, and we attend class in case there is a major piece of infor­ma­tion being dis­trib­uted. The back is for us, the peo­ple who don’t bother lis­ten­ing to 10 pages of the dreaded power point slides, and instead, we learn on our own time. It has worked the first two years, and as I dip my feet into more spe­cial­ized courses where it seems the more spe­cial­ized you get, the worse the eng­lish of the pro­fes­sor becomes, lec­tures become even more use­less. I could tell he wasn’t pay­ing much atten­tion any­ways, and by the end his neck couldnt keep his head up long enough to with­stand the power of numer­i­cal analy­sis. Although to be fair, the pro­fes­sor is par­tic­u­lary good, con­sid­er­ing he was a Math­e­mat­ics pro­fes­sor, which is why I bother to even attend the class, but after you’ve been to a cou­ple of classes with a use­less pro­fes­sor, you know its not even worth it.

While in my first semes­ter, I stopped going to my cal­cu­lus class only because it was too early, and if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t dare skip, I’d rather sit and play games in class, at least I could say I was there. It wasn’t until my sec­ond semes­ter that I real­ized I could skip out on my lec­tures with­out feel­ing a siz­able amount of guilt. I find that a lot of peo­ple don’t come to this shock­ing rev­e­la­tion, and that for the rest of their uni­ver­sity careers, they con­tinue to attend a lec­ture no mat­ter how triv­ial it is to be there. I’m not sure why this is, maybe its because they feel that since they are pay­ing for the class, they might as well attend. I feel that I pay $500 for the three cred­its, not to lis­ten to a guy/girl who is paid to research and couldn’t give two shits about teach­ing. Or maybe some peo­ple can actu­ally learn with a bad pro­fes­sor. I don’t know how these peo­ple do it, they must have dodged the A.D.D. bul­let that most stu­dents have been hit by at some point in their uni­ver­sity careers. I for one, would rather hon­estly catch up on sleep then pre­tend­ing like I’m enjoy­ing text pro­jected through a lens run­ning on Microsoft Powerpoint.

Mind you, there are def­i­nitely excep­tions. Some­times, pro­fes­sors can be enter­tain­ing and use­ful. My cal­cu­lus pro­fes­sor was excel­lent, as were my data structure/algorithms prof, my psy­chol­ogy prof, and a cou­ple of other ones. They were worth lis­ten­ing to, and I’m sure I’ll have a cou­ple more who can prove to me that not all pro­fes­sors are com­pletely use­less. But the point I’m try­ing to make is that stu­dents don’t really come to uni­ver­sity to get an edu­ca­tion from a lec­ture. In uni­ver­sity, the goal to learn how to learn, and one can only truly learn how to do that by real­iz­ing that the time spent in a lec­ture the­ater could have been put towards some­thing much more pro­duc­tive. Don’t be upset that your pro­fes­sor can’t really speak Eng­lish, the mate­ri­als for you to learn are pro­vided to you, take this oppor­tu­nity to real­ize that its not his respon­si­bil­ity to teach you, and that if you have enough inter­est and/or drive to suc­ceed, you should be able to teach your­self just fine. In the end, uni­ver­sity is sup­pose to teach you the big­ger pic­ture, that no one is going to be out there to hold our hand, and its no ones respon­si­bil­ity but your own to get us what you want. Its my per­sonal opin­ion that if you can come to the real­ity that lec­tures are use­less, and as a result of this, learn how to learn on your own, then you have received the great­est edu­ca­tion of all, and have learned a greater les­son then any pro­fes­sor could ever lec­ture on.

I find that more and more peo­ple in this day and age can’t go two min­utes with­out becom­ing finicky and resort­ing to pulling out their cell phone. I’d sus­pect that eighty years ago, it was per­fectly accept­able to go hours on end with noth­ing to do, which would open the mind to new, unique forms of enter­tain­ment that I’m sure are very promi­nent in our cul­ture today. They had the oppor­tu­nity to let the mind explore end­less possibilities.

Now, maybe the inter­net hasn’t phys­i­cally given us A.D.D., but it has released the beast from within. What I mean by that is we are no longer in a state where we can pos­si­bly pay atten­tion to some­thing that isn’t at least as enter­tain­ing as what you can do on, say, your phone. When­ever we are bored, when­ever there is noth­ing to do, our noth­ing is replaced by some­thing, and of course this is bad because noth­ing is not only good, its healthy. The white noise of our soci­ety is no longer using our mind to explore the pos­si­bil­i­ties of life and nature. It is mak­ing a phone call, send­ing a text mes­sage, or brows­ing the mobile web. Our noth­ing is now some­thing, and doing some­thing bor­ing has fallen below the enter­tain­ment thresh­old pro­vided by nothing.

Years ago, lis­ten­ing to a lec­ture would not be a chore, it would be a val­ued expe­ri­ence because there would be noth­ing else while in that room that could be more enter­tain­ing. Now, I can resort to a whole whack of dif­fer­ent devices that will cure my woes, such as my lap­top, my cell phone… even my cal­cu­la­tor has games on it! And now, we are sub­ject to such enter­tain­ment every­where we go, I can even watch YouTube on the bus, allow­ing me to com­pletely block off my nat­ural sur­round­ings. I feel that now, its dif­fi­cult to pay atten­tion to a lec­ture even when its a topic that’s inter­est­ing to me, because well, I can be doing some­thing even more enter­tain­ing, and again, my stan­dard of noth­ing is more enter­tain­ing then doing this cer­tain something.

Now, don’t get me wrong, if I was pre­sented with the choice of a non-internet, stone aged life, or a A.D.D, inter­net filled life, well all know which one I’d opt for the lat­ter, but non-the-less we all must deal with these side effects. But deal­ing with them may be much harder then any­one would think. You have to train your mind to block dis­trac­tions, and the only way to do this is through brute force. When you have to get work done, find a nice quiet place, close the mes­sag­ing client, block out Face­book, and then hope­fully, you can get used to hear­ing noth­ing but your own won­der­ing thoughts. Oh, and shut off your phone, its as biggest dis­trac­tion of all. If any­one can suc­ceed at this, tell me how.

While access to the inter­net twenty-four seven is def­i­nitely a con­ve­nience, I really believe that we need to take time out of our day to be dis­con­nected com­pletely. The idea of being teth­ered to the inter­net all day can be dam­ag­ing, espe­cially for busi­ness­men. Hope­fully, I can learn to dis­con­nect once and a while, so I can go about my daily life with­out reciev­ing an email while I should be hik­ing a moun­tain, or go on Digg when I’m out with my friends. The inter­net is an addic­tion, and I truly believe it has given us all A.D.D.. The real chal­lenge in today’s in our gen­er­a­tions daily life is being able to embrace the inter­net, and at the same time, being able to get shit done.