Is Anybody Listening?

In “College Lectures: Is Anybody Listening?” David Daniels points out how lecture system affects a large number of college students, making students lack basic skills, general knowledge, and creativity as well. According to Daniels, lecture system, this traditional aspect of education has several inadequacies. But the solution- having smaller class demands “energy, imagination, and commitment from professors,” Daniels indicates. However, they force students to “share responsibility for their own intellectual growth,” even though they can be tiring. Finally, Daniels declares that lectures will never fade out from university because they are “economically necessary,” so “students must learn to listen before they listen to learn.” I found Daniels’ points are exactly what I feel about present educational system.

Although students possess higher degrees these days, employers usually feel that owning degree, even doctoral degree, doesn’t mean these graduates have the quality for the job. On the contrary, the administrators often find their employees uncreative, unambitious, and arrogant sometimes. These executives with academic degree think that they are intelligent, but, the thing is, their ideas are often boring, dull, and lack innovation.

Needlessly to say, such conditions arise from the lecture system. Present lecture system makes more than a hundred students enroll in single course. It is unlikely to have roll call at the beginning of each class, imagine how long is going to take to call at least one hundred names and check if there are any absences or not. Therefore, because professors make roll call infrequently, students skip classes easily. On account of big class, professors hardly know how students perform in class, for students don’t have to join in discussion groups, they need not to express their ideas to their fellow students and instructors. This generates many problems. First, students can only gain knowledge from professor’s outdated data. They don’t get the chance to hear what others’ opinions about the materials that they are learning, so they lack the new stimulus to study better. If the class is smaller, students can have debates or experiments to learn better than listen to the old professor talking the theory in book with a monotonous tone. In fact, not only students get bored listening to the dreary lecture, the lecturers feel tiresome while they see students’ lifeless faces.

I often find myself dozing off while having classes like that. In class, the instructor talks more than anyone else in the classroom, and students soon get distracted by other things, for it’s difficult to remain awake if they do nothing but listening. Listening is kind of a passive way of learning. Students don’t write essays to present ideas of their own or give any feedback to their lecturer, as a result, both teachers and students who are eager to gain some useful knowledge in their lectures disappointed by this situation.

In conclusion, lecture seems to be the most common way of teaching in ancient time and also at the present time, so it’s not possible to abolish it immediately. But both sides: students and professors need to improve this condition, so that we students can learn more from professors and classmates, and professors can also gain some extra knowledge from their students.