In Defense of Lecturing

Today's Times has what is, to my mind, both a telling and a vindicating article, "In the Age of the Overamplified, a Resurgence for the Humble Lecture." The lecture has a bad reputation for reasons I do not quite understand. I think part of the problem is this mindset of students as consumers, this belief that it is our responsibility to keep them entertained and happy, to give them what they want rather than what they need. A student-evaluation-driven system of teaching assessment does not help, especially when it seems pretty clear that there are ways to improve one's evaluations while at the same time making one's classes significantly less rigorous. The idea behind student evaluations is that students best know what they want and what they need. I challenge that mindset: Sometimes students LEAST know what they need even if they know precisely what they want. I will categorically assert that undergraduate college students are unqualified, maybe even uniquely unqualified, to judge much of what goes on in a university classroom. This is not a call to abandon evaluations, which have their place, but rather to de-emphasize them.

(As a caveat: My evaluations are very good and my teaching at UTPB has been lauded in my merit evaluations so far; that said, I know I will likely never reach the absolute highest level of student evaluations at least in part because of my expectations for how much reading and writing they must do, the rigor with which I grade, and the fact that I do not embrace this idea of the student as consumer. Students pay for the opportunity to take my classes. they pay for the chance to succeed or fail. They do not pay to have their way, they do not pay to judge the quality of the books I choose to assign, and they do not pay for Romper Room.)

One of the reasons the lecture seems to have fellen out of favor is because of educational theorists who prattle on about "multiple learning styles" that are useful for what they are, but that are not all that telling. That students learn in many ways does not mean that all ways of learning are equal, or that all ways of learning are even equally valid. Students love movies; they rave about movies on evaluations; but movies are not necessarily the best way to run a class even if they are the most popular medium. I show movies as much as the next professor and more than some, but I do so to supplement the things I have to teach my classes, not merely to keep them engaged. A good lecture still not only has its place, but deserves to have pride of place in most any curriculum. A good lecturer can engage, can convey ideas, can illuminate, and, yes, can show off. A good lecturer allows his or her expertise to play out in the most effective way. That some students find this approach "boring" should be of no moment. Catering to student boredom is catering to the least engaged students.

Furthermore, students love Powerpoint. But they love Powerpoint because such presentations distill the complicated into the simplified, and allow them to ingest their material in bite-sized little chunks that do not require them to chew. In the hands of some professors, I am sure that Powerpoiunt is a wonderful tool. I just swear that I have rarely seen Powerpoint lectures that were not more distracting than illuminating. This idea that we must bring technology into the classroom rather than use technology where it will demonstrably help is another trend that has gone far enough.

The good old fashioned lecture has been on the defensive for too long. It is about time that some of us take the offensive. The best teachers I have ever had are also the best lecturers. that is not a coinsidence. But then again, as a student I never saw myself as a consumer, and I never saw my desires as the driving force behind what went on in the classroom. It is nice to see that both inside and outside of academia, some people are beginning to recognize what is so right about the simple power of someone who knows something speaking to those who know less.