College ectures.doc

College Lectures: Is Anybody Listening? By David Daniels College students are doodling in their notebooks or gazing off into space as their instructor lectures for fifty minutes. What is wrong with this picture? Many would say that what is wrong is the students. However, the educator and author David Daniels would say that the lecture itself is the problem. As you read this article, see if you agree with Daniels’s analysis of lectures and their place in a college education. This article is chosen from College Writing Skills with Readings (1997). A former teacher of mine, Robert A. Fowkes of New York University, likes to tell the story of a class he took in Old Welsh while studying in Germany during the 1930s.On the first day the professor strode up to the podium, shuffled his notes, coughed and began.”Good day, ladies and gentlemen’’. Fowkes glanced around uneasily. He was the only student in the course. Toward the middle of the semester, Fowkes fall ill and missed a class. When he returned, the professor nodded vaguely, to Fowkes’s astonishment, began to deliver not the next lecture in the sequence but the one after. Had he, in fact, lecture to an empty hall in the absence of his solitary student? Fowkes thought it perfectly possible. Today American colleges and universities (originally modeled on German ones) are under strong attack from many quarters. Teachers , it is charged, are not doing a good job of teaching, and the students are not doing a good job of learning. American businesses and industries suffer from unenterprising, uncreative executives educated not think for themselves but to mouth outdated truisms the rest of the world has long discarded. College graduates lack both basic skills and general culture. Studies are conducted and reports are issued on the status of higher education, but any changes that result either are largely cosmetic or make a bad situation worse. One aspect of American education too seldom challenged is the lecture system. Profe