I’m bored. My initial excitement to be creating html documents from scratch was quickly diminished by the teacher moving on to Dreamweaver. So now I get the same sense of entitlement WordPress gives me. The only problem is that it’s difficult to learn anything when technology simply does everything for you. Its like an aut0-formatting essay, only requiring some loosely connected content to be pasted into the white space.
Thus, I’m bored. Very bored. One of the greatest flaws of this class is that while it is useful, its largely lecture based. The more logical process would be to give readings and instructions for homework, while attempting to apply the acquired knowledge is done within the class. Then, the teacher would be able to walk around and help individual problems and answer questions.
Instead, I get to sit down and listen to an hour and a half, tedious walkthrough, which covers the same amount of ground as 15 minutes of independent study. I usually have a notebook in front of me to doodle in, but today I was trying to come up with an idea to write about. At first it was just a way to alleviate my boredom, but then I figured it would provide a decent five-minutes of entertainment to work my current annoyance into a post.
I have another teacher that fails to understand why students are so distracted by computers in her class, and she wishes to nip the problem in the bud by banning computers. What she doesn’t realize is that people have better things to do than listen to her talk for an hour. She also gets mad when people doze off and are unable to remember anything she said.
That class has the same problem as the one I’m in now. Most of the lecture material is designed to be read in a few minutes and then applied, as opposed to learning just to learn. Both teachers seem to have developed their style in order to avoid assigning too much homework. However, all they would need to do is swap the order of their process. Readings to gather information are used outside of class, the application of knowledge via assignments is done in class.
I plan on using this website as part of a few final projects, so a few of my teachers might cock an eyebrow and dock my grade for trash talking their teaching methods. Ideally, they’ll just glance over these posts and give me my B-. That being said, one of the classes this website will serve as a project for is a class with a high amount of participation with some reasonably hefty reading done outside of class. Thus, the mind-numbing boredom is limited by how slow I read, and classes themselves are based upon discussing the material. So that class is great.
Now give me an A. Or a B-, since I stopped caring about grades after my near failure of that philosophy class. By the way, the philosophy class possessed a teacher with a very unique teaching style. Hefty readings outside of class, and long lectures in class. There were three opportunities for application in the form of essays written in class, which stressed one approach, that of what the teacher said, and discouraged anything else. It was not so much a self-driven journey of intellectual discovery as it was being stuffed into a bag, yelled at by some stranger who would occasionally throw scraps of paper inside, and then being hurled into a swamp and told to use what was learned from the papers and screaming to turn the swamp into a parking lot for a mini-mall.
Now read my lecture on lectures, so that you may be lectured more better!
