Jansepar.com

I will do this one day.

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.