What do you want from a teacher?

[pmb]

Nowadays, there is so much information available at everyone's fingertips that teachers giving students facts is a dead and dying model of education. I'm pretty sure that having a teacher is essential to the learning process, but the contents of a lecture/class/lab/whatever now have to be ... what? Certainly different in some way - slowly dealing out facts in dribs and drabs is old school (hah!) and boring, ignoring those facts and zooming in to discuss implications and intuition is nice, but lends itself too readily to surface-level-only understanding.

The middle path seems like a nice compromise, with facts dashed across the board quickly and then intuition discussed aloud followed by homework assignments that require a solid understanding of the facts, but my own intuition is screaming at me that I am looking at things on the wrong axis somehow. Like I have divided everything into left/right and ignored some crucial up/down aspect that will simplify the whole matter.

What's the missing axis? What do you want from a class? Facts? Intuition? A bit of both? A check mark on your transcript? Are online classes consisting of prerecorded lectures a good idea? Would you go to school via podcast? Why or why not? What would the podcast be missing that more traditional schooling provides?

Answers that include how class should change in light of emerging technologies and trends like MIT's Open Courseware initiative will be given double bonus extra credit.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Get your letters today! Many are still unclaimed! I may forgotten to link to someone who already did it; if so, please let me know. This is taking a while, so I think I will start stealing the answers that others have already provided...

Comments

[esmesquall.livejournal.com]

It depends on the subject I'm studying, but there are a few answers.

- Peers. This is easily the number one reason I went to college, and the reason I stuck it out to the end. Notice that the coursework I got high-centered on, and dragged my ass through last summer, was lower-division, not-in-my-major work. I went to college partly because I didn't know anybody who liked to read and write as much as I did, and liked to have foaming-at-the-mouth geeky conversations about books and writing. While such people are actually fairly rare even in college English departments, I succeeded in finding them, and then worked hard to try to keep up with them conversation-wise.
- Feedback. This comes closer to answering your question about what I want in a teacher. Some of this comes down to Wanting to Impress Smart People, but a good teacher can also be like a border collie -- herding students along and making sure they don't get too far off course. (This does not mean students are sheep. If you've spent any time with border collies, you know they herd absolutely everything that's moving and plural.) This is also crucial if I'm learning a new skill, like a language or a new set of mathematical concepts or a craft skill or whatever. I'm a pretty decent autodidact, up to a point, but tend to plateau unless I have someone to help me get to the next level. Often, the problem lies my weakness as a reader of technical insturctions -- when I have a knitting problem, I'll sometimes show the pattern to Laurel and have her decipher a seemingly-cryptic bit of instruction for me.
- A critical framework. This is part of the answer to the question, "Why would anyone want to study literary criticism?" which has been idly raised in our circle in the past. The fact is that many students, for whatever reason, do not think critically; even those declaring an English major know that they like to read, and they know that they like some books more than others, but they don't necessarily know why. (I would say that many humanities majors declare such majors because they can't hack critical thought, but I'm not sure it's fair to ignore all the dumb engineering majors I've encountered. There's a startling number of educated adults who can hack neither a five-paragraph essay nor a geometric proof.) These students, as you can well imagine, are a huge pain in the ass to deal with in a lit class: "Um, this book was just, like, really really dumb! I do not get it, like, at all!" It's a bit like refusing to show your work in a math class -- but these students can't be blamed for it, because they probably haven't been taught how to show their work. Giving them a critical vocabulary helps them approach these problems in a more evenhanded, articulate and informed way. So that "This book is fucking dumb" can at least become, "The author's attempt to rewrite Shakespeare's King Lear from a twntieth-century, rural, middle-class feminist perspective is intriguing, but if the reader doesn't catch the references, the book is flat, soap operatic and trivial." (Yes, I'm talking about a real book here. I enjoyed reading it, but it didn't really survive under the critical microscope.)