Secret Origins: Large Lecture Edition
When progressives talk about the affordability of higher education, they normally focus on the idea of having the federal government give middle class families more money or more generous loan terms with which to pay the tuition bills. And that’s fine, laudable even. But also a process whose logic is a little self-limiting. If college tuition is going to get dramatically more expensive in real terms every year then it’s going to be very difficult over the long run to substantially increase the proportion of the population acquiring higher education no matter how we shift around the responsibility. At some point you need to tackle the root of the problem, which is that the productivity of our institutions of higher education isn’t increasing at all. That means subjecting our existing institutions to more scrutiny than they’re comfortable with is probably going to be necessary, and it also means the revisiting first principles, as Brad DeLong does in an excellent post on the origins of the large lecture course, is a good idea. He observes that large lectures had a compelling logic in the pre-Gutenberg universe:
– Universities have their origins in the medieval need of the powerful to train theologians (for the church) and to train judges (for the emperor and the kings of France, England, Castile, and other kingdoms.
– A manuscript hand-copied book back in 1000 cost roughly the same share of average annual income as $50,000 is today.
– Hence if you have a “normal” college–eight semesters, four courses a semester–and demand that people buy and read one book a course, you are talking the equivalent of $1.6M in book outlay. Can’t be done.
– Hence you assemble the hundred or so people who want to read Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy in a room, and have the professor read to them–hence lecture, lecturer, from the Latin lector, reader–while they frantically take notes because they are likely to never see a copy of that book again once they are out in the world administering justice in Wuerzburg or wherever.
Modern practice, by contrast, is a bit puzzling. If this is a useful way of instructing people, it seems that perhaps lectures should be much bigger with modern information technology allowing thousands of people — millions even — to listen to a single highly skilled lecturer, much as tens of millions of Americans will tune in tonight to listen to Barack Obama. And if it isn’t a useful way of instructing people, then it seems like we shouldn’t do it at all and ought, instead, to do something more useful with our educational resources.
77 Responses to “Secret Origins: Large Lecture Edition”
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August 28th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Sigh. No, it’s the same share of income. DeLong wasn’t saying that a book in 1000 cost $50,000 in today’s money. He may have misspoken, but there it is.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Wait a second, I just checked out Delong’s post. The mistake (seems) to be his. He really has to clarify what he means. Did books cost $50,000 in today’s money back in 1000, or did they take up the same share of income compared to someone earning $50,000 a year today?
August 28th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
I’m all for scrutinizing universities for ways to increase productivity and bring down the cost of college, but getting rid of large lecture classes is an odd way to do it. As DeLong notes in his post, large lectures are cheaper than small seminars.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
I went to a college where large lecture classes pretty much didn’t exist – I had a single class of 70; everything else was less than 40, with most classes hovering around 20. Of course, it was a liberal arts college; at such institutions professors are paid less than at research universities and tuition is, by and large, quite high. Low student/faculty ratios are great, but they sure aren’t cheap.
OTOH, as someone involved at the margins of higher education, I’m mystified not exactly at the costs but at the rapidly rising costs. I mean, it’s not like professors (possibly excluding superstars) have been keeping ahead of inflation, and with the relentless move toward abusing/using adjuncts, I’m quite certain that the average class is, if anything, getting less expensive to teach.
My suspicion is that the arms race between universities bears a great deal of blame – universities compete to have the prettiest campus, the best physical facilities, the best athletics, etc. If I ever get a tenure-track job, I hope to some day spend some effort figuring out university finances, maybe by being on a faculty senate or something. One thing is undeniably true: at 95% of institutions, 95% of faculty are *not* particularly well paid – the surging cost of education has little to do with the main labor expense of, well, the actual educating.
One more thing: you Harvard types might not know this, but distance learning *is* becoming rapidly more important, so we *are* moving, if not towards classes of 1000, towards geographically distributed large classes. I’ve never taught a distance learning class before, but I’ve interviewed at many places where it’s an important priority.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Actually, you removed the part of Brad’s post where he explains why it’s probably rational to have large lectures. Would seem to be relevant, and I think he has it about right.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
It’s technically possible for every college student in the US (or even the world) to attend (in the virtual sense, at least) one lecture, so it seems to makes sense to consolidate those big freshman-level classes into one big lecture taught by the best professor in that area. Several teaching assistants may be needed to answer questions and/or grade homework and tests, but teaching assistants are way cheaper than professors.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Um, maybe it’s different on the continent, but in the UK, the pre-Gutenburg universities don’t use the large lecture format (for the arts), they use tutorials supplemented by lectures (which you can comfortably skip). It’s the newer universities (and the sciences everywhere) that teach predominantly by lecture. Furthermore, at Oxford we read a hell of a lot more than one book a course. More like two plus books a week, plus secondary material.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Where is the mis-speak? It clearly says, the same share then as $50,000 is today. Makes sense to me
At the same time, a steak might have cost the equivalent of two day’s labor, and so people didn’t eat steak
August 28th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Education is an enterprise that theoretically could scale really well. I would like to see the government offer an online university equivalent and various publicly administrated tests for various certifications. The federal government should also open up the worlds largest medical school and offer rigorous but independent certification for doctors breaking the artificially small supply caused by the AMA.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
I don’t know, I think the system works fine as far as my experience (I’ve never been in a class with over maybe 150 students in it, so I don’t know if it can be a lot worse than my experiences).
I’ve always learned a lot from the text books, and whevener I’ve had a good professor, they’ve usually added a lot of valuable insights, knowledge, and help through their lectures.
I think only the practical / comfort limitations should limit class sizes. If you want to schmooze with your professors, I think you’re not really up to speed on what college and grad school are supposed to provide and what you’re there for. I think getting to have one-on-one time with a prof is fine, but you shouldn’t at all whine about not being able to get it. If you need to make friends you should be able to talk to other students or grad students, and if you need to get extra held on the course, you should do the same, or be an adult and look in a book in the library.
There is no way there is anything you need to know in any course that you won’t be able to understand merely for the fact that you weren’t able to hold the professor hostage for 25 minutes and ask him/her to explain it again slowly in full 3 more times after class.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
MY, Harvey Lobster,
Do not forget that adminsitration is expensive, and its not going away. The administrators are now a professional class, often with EdDs and only sometimes with any teaching experience. They have an interest in staying employed and reproducing the circumstances that produce administrative jobs—things like studying the efficiency of the institutions. Here is Texas we’ve a lot of this going round….not that this sort of study improves education. Generally, it doesn’t. But it does generate a lot of paper which makes it looks like the adminstrators are actually doing something.
We’re unlikely to be bale to reform the adminstration, which is what really needs doing, until for exaqmple we get away from loans. There were others sources of adminsitrative growth, but a very important took place when the Reagan folks introduced the notion that scholarships should be taxable income; this lead to an increase in loans, and therefore a rapid growth in adminstrative jobs connected to the processing of loans.
The current standards movement will likely also increase the size of administration.
But the adminstrators do not teach. Very often they have little or no background in subjects which get taught, so all they can do is generate largely irrelevant reports.
We can reform education in thsi country in several meaningful ways, but they are all expensive, and therefore do not appeal to accountants or taxpayers; they are not efficient in the sense MY is bringing up; nor should they be. More teachers, better trained in actual subject areas, teaching smaller classes and better paid. I was listening to the local NPR station yesterday; we’ve lots and lots of teachers in Texas who aren’t teaching because they can be paid better elsewhere. They teachers we do have are bound by the strictures of reform, which means they do lots of stuff aimed at standardized tests or what gets called retention; only some of this stuff can be called teaching.
So fewer adminstrators, who don’t teach, and more teachers, who do.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
There is no way there is anything you need to know in any course that you won’t be able to understand merely for the fact that you weren’t able to hold the professor hostage for 25 minutes and ask him/her to explain it again slowly in full 3 more times after class.
If you can’t learn the material you should get into something else. The adult world isn’t a place where everybody who provides a service for us should feel entitled to have their hand held while they’re doing what they’re supposed to be qualified to do by themselves.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
I find large lectures to be very useful. If lectures were conducted over the internet, it would be impossible to ask questions, say if the professor went to fast or glossed over something.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Furthermore, at Oxford we read a hell of a lot more than one book a course. More like two plus books a week, plus secondary material.
Indeedy. And for the most part, the humanities don’t fall into the trap of having One Holy And Bloody Expensive Textbook that you’ll find either in the sciences, or in US college courses in general.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Michael Foody writes: “Education is an enterprise that theoretically could scale really well.”
Well, parts of it can, especially lectures, if you think that lectures work well as a learning mechanism. But that’s not “education;” that’s one mechanism, within education, of producing one part of the product.
Science labs don’t scale up all that well. Language labs, I’m not so sure about. Classes taught in computer labs (statistics, for example, or accounting), also not so much.
And grading does not scale well. It’s not easy to move a class up from 40 to 400 and maintain grading consistency, accuracy, and speed. In fact, absent using a whole lot of graders, moving from 40 to 400 means moving from written exams to multiuple choice exams. Not at all the same thing.
This is a crucial thing to keep in mind, and I think about it every time I read something like “It’s technically possible for every college student in the US (or even the world) to attend (in the virtual sense, at least) one lecture, so it seems to makes sense to consolidate those big freshman-level classes into one big lecture taught by the best professor in that area.” (Christopher Monnier) This just leaves out most of the teaching-learning activity.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Matt, I understand you have some connections in the edu-wonk world, could you find out what the best research says about why education costs are going up so dramatically? I would find it interesting both for the university system and for the public education system.
While an undergraduate I was lucky enough to spend two years at universities abroad. After college I also taught in Japanese public schools for three years (shout out to fellow JETs!). My time at both levels always left me scratching my head.
I know that our country spends vastly more per pupil but where the hell does the money go?
August 28th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
They’re teachers. Their service is the hand holding. Otherwise everyone would just buy the text and read it at home.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Michael Foody,
No, lectures do not scale well, at least not that well. More students drop out of webbased courses than classroom course. The reason is pretty simple. The webbased courses actually require a lot more perserverance, a ton more dedication. As the admnstrators continue to call for greater retention, fewer and fewer of us are going to want to teach webbased courses for this very reason—students disappear into the either never to be heard of again. The arguments of scale might appeal to accountants and adminstrators, but those folks generally do not teach.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
There needs to be more money that the federal government should give directly towards state colleges and universities. In Colorado, the state that I live in, colleges and universities were the first ones to receive massive cutbacks in funding. As a result tuition rose more than twenty percent in a period of five years. I really don’t know how any increase in student aid in the form of pell grants and loans could make up for this difference. The only way to remedy the situation would be for the federal government to give money directly towards the state universities and colleges in order to make up for the lost revenue due to the cutbacks in state funding.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
I think education today functions like hazing at a fraternity. It is tangentially connected with learning.
Books are cheap. Computers, the internet, CDs, television all can make instruction by 1st rate minds incredibly easy. Learning should be incredibly cheap. We don’t do it because it would dilute the economic incentive to build large universities. Basically, universities are economic institutions first, usually athletic institutions next, and educational institutions trailing along at some remove.
I can’t remember the comedy which showed a bunch of tape recorders taking down a lecture from another tape recorder. That was a gag, but (except for the irrelevant room and forcing students to make cheap copies of the tape) it seems to me a reasonable thing to do. An Ivy Leaguer listening to some philosopher in the same room and a grocery stock clerk listening to a taped lecture over an iPod are hearing the exact same words, but it isn’t done that way because few would profit.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
They’re teachers. Their service is the hand holding.
++ to that. And it’s not an insult to us educators to say that, either. People are social creatures, and while a lot of learning can take place in isolation (as anyone with a Ph.D. can attest), most students learn well *with* other students, and with an instructor who can respond to their needs.
And as far as grading goes – multiple choice tests are badly flawed instruments, and using disposable graduate students to do all grading has its own (large) set of problems. If evaluating work is important, at the end of the day you need people with a doctorate and some experience to do the evaluating. And we all know that conservatives find stringent and accurate evaluation to be the be-all, end-all of education — therefore, all grading should be done by professors. Right……?
In short, education does *not* scale well. Which doesn’t mean that we should eliminate lectures, or even that we should completely avoid distance learning; we just need to recognize that tutorials and seminars are ideal when possible, and that other formats are imperfect compromises.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Everyone I’ve known who has complained the loudest about class sizes at the college/university level has always sounded like they either wanted to make friends with the professor, or were really under-confident about grasping the material.
First, the idea that you pay your college tuition to make friends with the professors is absurd. The professors have lots of students, and their job is to teach you, not to stick around after class to become your prestigious friend.
Second, even if you don’t feel like you know every single thing about the course material all the time, it doesn’t matter- just get an A or an A- on all the tests, and you’re still a big success. In practice, there are mundane details about their professions that even physicians and lawyers don’t know off the tops of their heads, and that slip into their passive memory. When they need to know it during their job, they look it up. Grades are a way to find out how much you should get paid at your first job, not to tell people they’re idiots.
DaveNYC wrote: They’re teachers. Their service is the hand holding. Otherwise everyone would just buy the text and read it at home.
If you look at what I wrote in the comment before the one you’re quoting from, it’s obvious that I’m not saying that people should be expected to know everything without a teacher or that teachers are unnecessary. If you pay attention to the teacher, though, they should give you enough that you shouldn’t need extra help from them to get anything you missed. You should be able to fill in the blanks from your own study or from getting help from somebody else, and still know enough to get a passing grade.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Did you see this recent Money Magazine article on the costs of college? Quite telling.
To an extent costs are going up because universities get more credibility by being expensive. It’s stupid, but there you go…
August 28th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Just for the record, I myself have talked to plenty of professors after class. But I never felt like I had too- little access to them, or that anything after class was necessary to my success. If I went back to school, I would probably bother the professors a lot less (I probably wouldn’t talk to them after class at all).
August 28th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Yeah, yeah, yeah – sure, students might learn better in smaller settings, and/or with more individual attention. But think of us instructors: the current large lecture practice makes great sense given that the more students = the more T.A.s we get = the less grading we have to do. It’s simple math.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Hmm… I’m wondering what kind of learning experiences Swan has actually had. It’s not strictly necessary for students to interact with instructors to learn, but it does facilitate learning in a large number of cases. Probably many students who were struggling to otherwise learn, master material effectively this way. I guess you can call it hand holding, but some people think it’s worth it to spend money improving the learning experience. You could also argue that we’re better off using cheaper resources, like graduate students, for this process. But frankly, it calls your credibility into serious judgment if you cannot concede that interactivity can add value to the learning process.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
I think Djeri at #11 has hit the nail right on the head. As the anonymous quotation says, the bureaucracy will always expand in order to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. (Minor paraphrase admitted.)
For every new layer of red tape that is installed around the Office of the Provost, for every new internal form that must be filled out by hand in triplicate, for every memo re: memo re: minutes of the meeting last Thursday afternoon, there is a corresponding dollar amount that cannot be spent on the primary missions of higher education: education and research.
In order to lower costs, and therefore tuition, the truly unnecessary layers of bureaucracy must be peeled away.
This, of course, creates the primary problem that faces all governmental systems. How does one eliminate wasteful spending in an area when that area controls the budget for its own wasteful spending?
Joseph Heller would be proud.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
You sound like Bucky fuller circa 1978
August 28th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
1) The USA has a low-key educational program to identify and develop the talents of our young geniuses in K12. Run in their regions largely by 5 major universities: John Hopkins (North East), Duke (South), Northwestern (Midwest), Stanford (West) -although other colleges are getting into the act.
2) For Math instruction, Those 5 universities all use a SOFTWARE program –called EPGY –developed by Stanford. (EPGY has been expanded to other subjects as well.)
3) My son’s math grades dropped from A to B- when he was in the second grade. When I asked him why, he said he was bored. I checked the internet, found EPGY and enrolled him in the math course. Within a few months, he was scoring two years ahead of grade level.
4) By test scores,etc our school district is rated the best in Pennsylvania. When I discussed this with his principal, I got an unusual reaction. His school discouraged use of EPGY — because they argued he would be finishing calculus in middle school and would have nothing to study in high school unless he entered college at 15. Which would be inappropriate for psychological reasons. Instead, the school offered a private tutor –for him and 4 other students — who would develop their talents by focusing on complex applications of math.
5) My son later won acceptance at Phillips Exeter Academy — which largely teaches the same thing as public schools but in smaller classes and in somewhat different ways. My son was among their few National Merit Scholars, even though he does not want to pursue math as a career. His SAT scores were around 750 – 800.
6) I only mention this because I think Stanford’s EPGY SOFTWARE has enormous advantages over public school teaching –although you still need teachers to motivate kids and help tutor them over occasional rough spots.
One EPGY advantage is that it is a computer game –and kids will concentrate intensely for hours on computer games because they think they are fun.
The other advantage is that it is enormously more efficient than classroom sessions. Because it lets kids run at their own pace. The kid takes a computerized test. If he already knows the material, EPGY lets him go on to the next segment. If he has problems with some area, the computer repeats the instruction in that area and retests him.
Consequently, kids can race ahead if they learn the material (so are kept excited, NOT bored) yet they are never frustrated by failure if they have problems with some item.
You could raise the average SAT scores of America by 300 points if you spent $2 million and gave a few million copies of EPGY software to our K12 schools. But you would really piss off the teachers unions.
The REAL COST of K12 is NOT the $1 Trillion per year in taxes — it is in what it does to our kids.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
As someone who has taught several hundred students, all in seminars and small lectures, I can say this with absolute confidence: there is a strong correlation between students who interact (both with one another and with me) and those who earn high grades. There are people who interact and turn in poor work, and there are people who never “bother” me (honestly, I almost never think of it in terms of bothering – I like interacting with students, or I wouldn’t teach!) and yet earn great grades, but learning is *obviously* facilitated by interacting with one’s instructor and peers. And, honestly, this is the case in the sciences, too — scientific learning at the graduate level is a highly social enterprise. Most scientists, most of the time, aren’t learning in isolation – they’re learning in a laboratory, with graduate students and professors working together.
And here’s the thing about learning in isolation, or “self-teaching,” or whatever. I have a humanities Ph.D., so I know something about this subject — I read hundreds of books and wrote a 400 page dissertation by myself. IT’S HARD. Most people who start Ph.D. programs don’t finish, and at least a plurality of those who don’t finish choke at the dissertation stage (at least in the humanities) – that’s because sitting, by yourself, with the need to read tens of thousands of pages of difficult material. Weirdly enough, having affirmed that I’m competent to learn on my own (that would be one good definition of the Ph.D. in the humanities), I have a lot *more* confidence in the fact that most people, most of the time will always do much better learning in a classroom. It’s easier, it’s more natural, it has clear carrots and sticks. There’s a reason why we do things the way we do them.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
“Second, even if you don’t feel like you know every single thing about the course material all the time, it doesn’t matter- just get an A or an A- on all the tests, and you’re still a big success.”
Not really. Some of the most educational experiences I’ve had in college were in talking to my math profs after lectures and seeing where the course material *went,* what its greater use was in the mathematical world. Your comments might be more applicable for people not heading into academia; but if the ivory tower is your aim, you have to do a lot more than just ace tests, fwiw.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Re Swan’s comment “If you pay attention to the teacher, though, they should give you enough that you shouldn’t need extra help from them to get anything you missed. ”
————
Sounds like a shitty university to me.
Maybe Swan teaches at Harvard — and averts his eyes whenever an undergraduate looks at him while crossing the lawn.
The only reason you need a teacher is to get advice re a field — based on their broad experience. What’s it like to work in the field –what are the rewards and demands. What are the new and evolving areas. Who are the main authorities. What are the best references. What are the best approaches to take in learning and applying the material. What’s the point of it all.
I can just see Bill Gates approaching Swan about something called a “microcomputer operating system” and being told to fuck off because Swan just explained the Job Control Language of IBM’s Mainframe in class and Gates doesn’t need to know any more.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Since when did college course become about learning? Almost everything taught in college is available in books and on the internet.
College is about getting a credential to show others that you have learned something and can handle the demands of college.
Professors consider the difficulty of leaning the material a feature, not a problem. It separates the wheat from the shaft.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Here we see one of the disadvantages of a pricey education at Harvard. The huge land-grant universities, with thousands of students from everywhere, teach some subjects, that many people need to know and are basic information, in large classes.
These classes are part of a curriculum. The curriculum is what the university needs to present to be accredited. Accreditation is usually done by a consortium of several states. You want to teach larger classes, you need to make the accreditation standards more universal.
Other classes are taught on the basis of what is needed and the practical class size. Many schools at a university, for example, will require a statistics course, so the department teaches a lot of students in larger classes, but not everyone needs the course, so you don’t usually get truly huge classes.
Then there are the classes you can’t get into unless you’re matriculated, and most of these are pretty small and expensive per student.
IOW, the size of the class and how expensive it is to teach it is related to what you have to teach and how many people you need to teach it to. Duh.
In other news, the president of the University of Washington makes $545,000 per year, and sometimes they give him bonuses. That kind if thing might have something to do with the costs of education.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
I forgot to mention: Stanford’s EPGY program had (has?) tutors that students can call if they have a problem making the EPGY software work or if they just can’t understand an explanation from the screeen. My son usually called them about two times a month to work through something. So we still need teachers.
Plus that are some subjects that are probably require more interaction and immediate feedback — like teaching writing by having the kid write and essay and then show him how to write it gooder. Or advanced courses in creative problem solving in different fields.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
Do people really learn while sitting in class in college? I always figured you taught yourself and sat in class to see if you learned the material properly or not.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
In the Middle Ages, rather than whole books, they used collections of exempla — excerpts — This fit in with the tradition of writing of small passages designed for memorization that now thought to be how preliterate societies conserved and transmitted knowledge before the invention of writing (i.e. before Plato)
There is a famous book about the exempla by Ernst Robert Curtius called European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages — still in print. (There are some good studies about the pre-cursors to Plato also, I understand.)
August 28th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
” It separates the wheat from the shaft.”
Chaff is seperated from wheat.
Shaft is the black private dick that’s a sex machine to all the chicks. Damn right.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
Matt, the university-industrial complex is one of the major bases of the Democratic Party.
August 28th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
A college education is only about 25 percent based on courses. That’s why live experiences cost so much: the market is foolishly willing to pay it.
Forget productivity. That’s not the problem, mostly because it’s impossible to measure.
The problem is that elite private universities, which almost no one attends, keep raising their prices and find that demand rises even faster. It’s the Phillips Curve upside down.
So let’s talk about the college that most Americans actually get — the publics.
Costs at public universities have not risen nearly as fast. They have risen mostly because private institutions keep driving up labor costs at the elite level. So maybe 30 public universities have struggled to keep up with higher costs. Meanwhile, every public institution has seen public funding slashed.
The real reason that the cost of education has risen sharply among publics is the steady Republican-led defunding of the systems. They have become cash businesses, despite providing essential public goods.
So all this talk of “efficiency” is just an intellectual game. This is about politics.
August 28th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
“First, the idea that you pay your college tuition to make friends with the professors is absurd. The professors have lots of students, and their job is to teach you, not to stick around after class to become your prestigious friend.”
I don’t care about making friends with the professors, but talking to them and getting their insight into their fields, being able to make connections, etc. is one of the most valuable things about college.
August 28th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
At #22 I wrote:
Grades are a way to find out how much you should get paid at your first job, not to tell people they’re idiots.
It may be sort of hard to see how this fit in with what else I was wrote. I just meant that if you feel like you don’t know everything in the assigned reading or every detail you were taught, you shouldn’t be frightened that you’re a dummy, paralyzed from continuing to study, or begin to feel that you can’t get a good grade. When I was in professional school, we studied plenty of history, policy, and background material on the main subject matter, and we only ended up being tested on something like 20 or 25% of what we were assigned to learn. That background material helps you understand what you’re doing, but a lot of it is not critical to learn or is even unimportant.
If you end up getting a D or a C+ in a college course, it doesn’t mean there is something permanently wrong with you, either. It could just mean that you had other things on your mind, and it wasn’t the best time for you to take that course. As is famously known, even Einstein got terrible grades at math at some points. If you’re getting bad grades at your college courses, you’re probably just not ready to do the work, and need to figure personal stuff out.
Adam Villani wrote:
I don’t care about making friends with the professors, but talking to them and getting their insight into their fields, being able to make connections, etc. is one of the most valuable things about college.
Well, I disagree. The professor is there to give lectures and to study his/her field. The student’s job is to learn the material and pass the tests. So long as the professor is giving appropriate lectures and filling whatever research requirements the Uni has, the professor’s ass is covered. Making friends and being social with other people is part of life, but frankly if a professor had almost any reason to not want to talk to any students at all after class– like just wanting to maintain a professional distance, not having a lot of time, or not wanting to get onto a slippery slope into having burdensome demands– I would totally understand and not look down on them for it at all. I don’t think the professor has to even like the students or be interested in helping them outside of class at all– the one exception I’d allow is, it should be a norm that a prof should write a few recommendations for student who are actually good and who ask for them.
August 28th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
A book’s cost in 1000 was the same share of average income then as $50,000 is today. Hence if you demand that people buy one single textbook for each of their 32 courses, you are demanding that they spend as large a multiple of their income then as $1.6M is today. Demand they buy six books a course, and you are talking the same share of income back then as $10M is today. Can’t be done. Wasn’t done. Hence the lecture.
In sociological terms, a book back then is the equivalent of those little convertible BMWs with the air intake scoops that some of the computer science professors like to drive…
August 28th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Swan, you are still missing the value of interactive learning. Which is pretty amazing to me, really. Yeah, it could be a drag on the professor’s time, but Universities generally expect professor’s to offer office hours for a specific reason: it helps you learn better. There are plenty of situations where a kid might get a C or a D in a class b/c he struggled to learn the material, but if he had a chance for interactive learning he would have been able to master it and get an A. It’s pretty hard for me to me imagine anyone going through a University experience comparable to mine without this becoming abundantly clear; so maybe your education experience was just much different.
August 28th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
This is a really bizarre conversation we are having. It is like we are having a pedagogical discussion, without anyone talking about pedagogy. Anyone who thinks that lecture size is a problem does not know a thing about modern college education (or should demand their money back from whatever school they went to).
The limiting factor is classroom interaction. Discussions, seminars, tutorials (go to the board and present your work to the class). These have to be small in order to get anything done. Size is less important for a straight lecture. When people push for small lecture size, they are not doing it for the lecture per se. They are just trying to combine the lecture with the other educational roles such as discussion so they can meet less often (which is also cost intensive). For example, in a smaller lecture, students are more likely to ask questions and get them answered. But there is no reason that this cannot be pulled out of lecture and handled at a separate meeting time. Many courses do just this; indeed, a large number of math classes at MIT are all tutorial with “lectures” consisting of pre-recorded material outside of class.
Considering a course as simply a “lecture” is ridiculous. While there are pedagogical advantages for using a non-interactive lecture over a book, there is none for using a non-interactive lecture over a video. This has lead to the popularity of distance education. But this does not solve the discussion bottleneck. Even the University of Pheonix, which is supposedly an “online university” is incredibly people intensive. They have a massive infrastructure for small groups to meet locally for tutorials and interact with an expert. This is why University of Pheonix has been relatively successful, and a lot of other attempts at distance education have been a miserable failure.
We can put lectures online and quizzes online because we know how to automate them. But no one knows how to automate the interactive part effectively.The whole push for games in education is a first attempt at automating some of these interactive elements of education, but there is a lot of crap out there. For every good piece of educational software, there are a thousand pieces of garbage. Furthermore, I have seen no educational software that was better than a good human teacher in this particular role.
If we are going to have conversations like this, then people need to learn a lot more about modern pedagogy than what I am seeing on this thread.
August 28th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
In sociological terms, a book back then is the equivalent of those little convertible BMWs with the air intake scoops that some of the computer science professors like to drive…
‘Back then’ is a little nebulous. If you shift forward in time to, say, 1250 — after Parisian scholars had crossed to Oxford, and disgruntled Oxonians headed off to Cambridge — then you’re heading into the world of manuscript culture and commercial, secular scriptoria. (What’s interesting, though, is that manuscript culture takes strongest hold for texts used outside academic settings.)
Picking up on Harvey Lobster: it’s not just the classroom, it’s an environment conducive to learning. It’s really hard to do independent research unless you live in a college town, because you don’t have good libraries at hand, and libraries aren’t just about easy access to texts.
August 28th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
“If you pay attention to the teacher, though, they should give you enough that you shouldn’t need extra help from them to get anything you missed. ”
It’s not about “extra help” (or shouldn’t be). It’s about learning to think and construct valid arguments as well as learning facts. The point of the tutorial system (and to a less effective extent larger classes) is that the tutors challenge the students to explain their positions and vice versa, and this way knowledge and understanding is advanced. You’re exposed to multiple arguments and different lines of evidence, rather than just the lecturer’s. Now, obviously the reality doesn’t always match the ideal, but I had plenty of tutorials where both students and tutor came out of it better off.
“And for the most part, the humanities don’t fall into the trap of having One Holy And Bloody Expensive Textbook that you’ll find either in the sciences, or in US college courses in general.”
The whole concept of teaching college level English Lit or even history from a textbook at all fills me with horror. For Christ’s sake. These people are adults. They should be reading primary sources and critics.
August 28th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
A book’s cost in 1000 was the same share of average income then as $50,000 is today.
I’m still confused, Brad. Are you saying the same thing as “A book’s cost in the year 1000 is the equivalent of $50,000 in 2008 dollars?” If so, why phrase it as a share of average income?
Also, sorry so long to reply: I just got my muffler, front gasket, and break light fixed. About $375 dollars. People back in the year 1000 could get their cars fixed for much less money:)
August 28th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Presumably because inflation and wage growth aren’t the same thing.
August 28th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
Jake at 25,
Where I teach–a community college north of Dallas–we don’t get TAs. When I taught at Notre Dame, no TAs. When I taught at Lehigh, no TAs. So big lectures aren’t necessarily that good an idea.
When I was a TA, at UVa long ago, I wasn’t paid very well. Community Colleges have the largest portion of American students. We already have a situation where many classes, far too many classes, are taught by adjuncts and TAs or people on one year or even one semester contracts…you know, people who don’t get paid very much.
These are not mysteries. Improving education in this country on the backs of parttime or temporary employees—now thats an accountant’s dream
August 28th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
Off Colfax at 27,
You said that very well. Joseph Heller would be proud. So would Franz Kafka.
August 28th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Walker at 45,
I think several people taking part in this conversation obviously do know a lot about pedagogy. You are of course correct that behind a lot of this talk is an assumption that much of teaching ought to be labor intensive, on the part of both teacher and student. But that doesn’t make a lecture non-interactive. Quite the opposite; well done a lecture is always interactive–I’d guess that Harvey Lobster would agree. On the other hand, you can’t discuss matters with a video. The only reason the video is more efficient is because it can be mass produce or put somewhere on the web. Its still like watching television. Maybe for some math, games would be good. But for the human sciences, for history, for creative writing?? No. It doesn’t work very well, that is unless you think education is the reguritation of factoids.
August 28th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
Some people could stand to take a look at the scientific research on the issue. Go forth and read:
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=6160
August 28th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
And by the way, talking about productivity with respect to education is approximately stupid. They way you’re thinking about productivity simply doesn’t apply, and for a very obvious reason: education is essentially a handicraft industry, as is medicine, and handmade furniture. It is difficult to be more productive in any of these without compromising quality since it takes a certain amount of time to produce each “piece” and that time is set not by practice or training or technology, but by human physical and mental constraints that aren’t changing any time soon. In fact, mass production in a handicraft industry causes quality to plummet precipitously, which is exactly what happens in a large lecture hall. But a small class size either produces fewer graduates (like graduate school) or employs vastly larger numbers of instructors, which in turn costs more.
August 29th, 2008 at 12:32 am
Oh, horseshit. You are speaking as if our schools are Socratic dialogues, in which a wise teacher leads his students through the paths of true reasoning and shows them how to recognize falsehood.
In reality, the schools spend limited time on training students how to think — out of a sense of self-preservation if nothing else.
Much of what schools work on is injecting knowledge which is reasonably current –i.e, is only about 20 years out of date.
Simply instilling knowledge — the much maligned “rote learning ” is not a totally bad thing — knowledge, basic skills and reasonably robust models of the world are what distinguish adults from befuddled infants. If you don’t believe me, ask a three year old to do your taxes.
But if you listen to our pundits for any amount of time, you realize that many people are amazingly ignorant of the most basic, most important subjects. With years of hard work– driven by hilariously deceitful promises of eventual success– Our citizens manage to master the complex skills needed to succeed as corporate drones.
But when it comes to understanding the structure and sources of power, they are as ignorant as three year olds. The elites like it that way.
In short, Our K12 curriculum is a crock of shit. The smart kids know it –that why our most successful, richest self-made billionaires are college dropouts and that is why it is hard to motivate kids to apply themselves in school.
Unfortunately, the kids have no power to challenge a moronic educational system which WASTES years of their lives. And their employers and parents are too busy with their own affairs to give a shit. So “strategic planning” and “curriculum reform” are captured by feather-bedding teachers unions. Who push a curriculum developed a 100 years ago for God knows what reasons because that the lazy thing to do.
In fairness, When you have to fight with the Texas Board of Education and Kansas just to teach major,well-established scientific findings, you lower your expectations. The teachers unions kiss the ass of political lobbys, the political lobbys hand tax money to the teachers, and everybody fucks the kids. Which I suppose is an education — of a sort.
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