The worst thing about school……. teachers who go on and on but yet never get to the point. I have had a few of those over the last few years. I realize this continuous ranting and raving about the same topic teaches me nothing. The reason why….. because I stop listening after the first few minutes. I have heard to learn and memorize an idea or concept you have to hear, see, or experience it at least 8 times. But not during the same lecture!
I understand that repeating it a second time gives students time to really understand the material being discussed. But when it appears three, four, or even five more times I just get angry. It’s like ‘Hello, I get it. Move on now’. For people who don’t understand they can go to open office hours….. don’t punish the people who are ready to move on to the next topic. I can see or hear the other 6 times when I am studying for the final.
I know I shouldn’t complain about this because I am not a teacher but there’s a point when you need to stop catering to the one or two people and do what’s best for the class. This brings up another idea that I have had for a while. The institute/university should have the professors, who are mostly their doing research anyways, have to take a public communication course before teaching.
Most of the time professors are only teaching because the school allows them to do their research on campus giving them the equipment and people they need to complete the project. With that though, some have no teaching experience and go in blind. This results in bad grades and very frustrated students. There are some of those teachers that think that just because they understand these outrageous concepts that the students will too. This is not the case, in fact, mostly students are only taking the course because their major requires it or it is a core class. These teachers need to be able to get done to the students level and see it from their eyes.
Also there are the professors who fail everyone. They won’t curve the test though because it’s not their fault the students didn’t get it. Those teachers need to be fired because that is not the point of teaching.
Lastly, the reason why I bring up the communication/speaking course is because presenting the information is the most important part in teaching. My freshman year I had a teacher who would end almost all her with ‘right?’. “So the amino acid goes here, right?” “So water is polar,right?” These sentences also started with ‘so’ because she liked to add that at the being of every sentence as well. I got so distracted by this, I started tallying every time she would say the words. One time I got 90 right’s and 56 so’s. I thought that was a lot until this past semester.
I took a 400 level virology class this past fall and boy did the teacher like to say ‘um’. In one class period I counted 365 marks on my paper and that was after I started 10 minutes in. The next day I counted 465. Exactly 100 tallies more than the day before. This means she was saying ‘um’ on average 9.2 times a minute! Not only did it make her sound like she was dumb and didn’t know the material I stopped taking notes altogether and just tallied. Because that was way more interesting than what she was saying.
So my conclusion to this rant is I should probably stop tallying and write notes.
To A Life Just Started 