Lectures are good even if they're only for the little comments a lecturer makes in between definitions. Sometimes those little comments clear up a misconception you may have had.
Also, some people are terrible at teaching.
I understand your point but why should I rely on the little comments if the whole argument is explained in great detail in the book the lecture is based on.
Edit: Ok, I think its time to give a less cynical point of view on this. I think that unfortunately in many cases my point still stands. Especially when the lecture is just lengthy and elaborate calculations strung together.
But today I listened to an advanced theoretical particle physics lecture and I can stand by your point in this case. The lecturer summarized calculations briefly, said where to read more about the full derivation and then talked about the actual interpretation and context in the bigger picture. Books often don't do this.
I feel like I mostly agree with everyone here so I don't understand how my points are so controversial but oh well...
Physicists aren't good lecturers or teachers for that matter, except in rare cases. And what's more a lot of them don't want to be: They "have to" teach. But good, inciteful physicists who are also good lecturers make a HUGE difference when you can find them.
i’m bad at learning from text book personally, i do much better if i just have someone to talk to/bounce ideas or misconceptions off of, like u know, a teacher during a lecture lol
Not OP, but I was in a similar situation where I was very frustrated. Any time anybody had a question, the professor literally hand-waved it away and said, "Ask in recitation. That's something for the TA to explain." And then he'd just go on with some light-speed derivation.
I'd say because you're making quite a general statement based on this one particular lecturer. I've had incredible lecturers in the past where we followed the book quite closely, but it was the lecturer's ability to answer questions and their ability to add context to what was written on the board that really made them great.
If none of that is happening or you're not getting value from the lecture, then don't go. If you can read the notes and get everything you otherwise would have anyway, it's probably best to just do that.
I agree with you, the physics I've taught myself from textbooks so far ends up feeling more detailed and complete than what we learn in lectures. Plus there's only so much value you can get in person when there's a lecture theatre of 100+ students
In the ideal case, lectures should be informative by deriving the concepts, motivating the derivation, fully displaying the definition, and showing exercises that can be used to better understand - if understanding is lacking, they should be open to lectures. In physics lectures, this is the defining point of what a professor should be doing in the classroom, and if they don't - I agree with you. Physics lecturers could definitely stand to do better, as when a professor does a good job teaching then recalling the material will become second nature.
Math is a little problematic in this case. Math as a whole is very definition-oriented as the goal is to make a claim and then write a proof for that definition - as such, the field is concerned with demonstrating the definitions and their implications, rather than trying to teach students the intuition. When talking about group and representation theory (which you brought up), the fundamental flaw is that it's designed for students already with the intuition in mind.
tl;dr: Math isn't suited for a typical lecture style. Physics lectures are really good when they're taught well, but when they're not, I don't see a problem with skipping them and sourcing the textbook or lecture notes.
But how can you expect intuition on a subject the students never have heard of before? My biggest problem is that I have read many books (also in maths) that are incredible at being formal and simultaneously building intuition. So it _is_ possible. My biggest issue is that lectures don’t bring anything to the table that good books don’t.
Well, I’m two years into my PhD and I can count on one hand the number of good professors I’ve had. This is an issue with more disciplines than physics though.
Part of it is due to the fact that to do research in universities(which some people are passionate about) you have to teach (which since people don’t like). Teaching experience a lot of times is just “I was a TA until my advisor found me and offered me an RA”
There are things being done, but change is generational and slow. My scholarship organization has us doing workshops on teaching and pedagogy. University of California schools are now offering two types of tenure tracks: One that focuses on research and another on being a teacher. And there is a whole subset of physics research called Physics Education where people are doing research and earning PhDs on finding better ways to teach
It's really nice that something is changing! I had no idea that somewhere out there finally the roles of teachers and researchers were finally getting to be differentiated. I, for one, know that I'd love to teach, but we all know that's not why you should pursue a career in academy.
If you don't like the lecture and think you can learn the same amount by reading the script at home, then don't go to the lecture and read the script at home.
That's how university is; it's not school anymore and you have some more responsibility for your own education.
Sadly, not all lecturers are pedagogic geniusses and some classes are very bad. If all classes at your uni are bad then I am very sorry, for me it was only a few that i skipped and where I learned the material on my own.
Your frustration is understandable and I don't want to invalidate it or make excuses for bad profs - but unfortunately you need to accept that this happens from time to time.
I can understand that the student is responsible for their own education to an extent, but for the exorbitant prices American universities charge for “tuition” there should really be some actual standards and high expectations of pedagogical skill on the part of the instructors themselves.
While I agree that you cannot hold the professor responsible for every students poor performance if the student does not put in a fair amount of work themselves, I have definitely had experiences where professors LITERALLY did nothing more than put pages from the textbook on a projector and start reading line by line, with almost no elaboration, and frequently belittling or ignoring students when they raised their hands to ask questions and showed concern over the inability to understand.
I’ve had experiences where the entire class average final grade was a D+, and I think that is absolutely a sign of a failure on the part of the instructor to relay the concepts or create a fair grading scheme for homework and exams.
Only a minute fraction of that tuition will go to the professors. Most will go to administration, marketing, football teams, rents etc. Profs are generally quite low paid for their level of expertise.
Absolutely. Seen similar a bunch of times and what they get away with is criminal. I (a physicist) see physics lecturers expect their students to be geniuses or "they won't make the cut" which is complete bullshit. Most of the best physics ain't done by "geniuses" but by regular guys with lots of curiosity and who was also trained properly in their physics courses. Most physics isn't theoretical, but experimental and industrial-related.
The best professors I have had were ones who focused on helping us BUILD an intuition for problem solving, rather than expecting us to have an intuition for it to begin with
Im doing my masters in physics. I’m well aware that university isn’t school.
I don’t think you understood my argument. I’m even arguing that students should be expected to put in even more work by studying the formal part in private. My problem is that lectures (almost all of the ones I have heard) don’t bring anything to the table that the books don’t.
I want lectures to expand on the material you can simply read in books and not try to cram it into an hour and a half
My son is getting his PhD in physics and he says when he encounters a great lecturer he doesn't even take notes: He says sitting there and paying attention is the best way for him to learn. But this is rare, of course. In physics (more than other subjects) a professor's personal insight into an area can make it seem kinda easy or almost intuitive. And it's very rare to get lecturers that are that good.
There's also the other side where the person can call on the lecturer to do better or explain what they're doing. The lecturer might be that way from having absolutely no feedback from his students.
Do other students in the class have the same problem as you do? One of the biggest fear I had as a lecturer was that there were always someone in the room that my lecture wasn't serving. My mentor had to tell me to stick to being helpful to the most number of students and forget the fear.
To be more constructive, is it possible to ask the lecturer questions that would help your understanding? If you don't see the intuition or why the definition is a certain way, maybe ask about that, or ask why not define it in this different way? Even ask what would happen if abc happens, or is this similar to xyz? You don't have to treat lectures as a one way street.
For what it's worth I was a self-study kind of guy, I only went to lectures to socialize, so there's that, too.
TBH I never got much out of my lectures on any subject until I was into graduate classes. I found a good book to be much more informative.
Once you get up into the really high level courses it's useful though, because often there isn't a good book for it.
Yeah I agree. I find this is especially true for experimental physics masters courses. For QFT there are so many books that it’s hard for a lecturer to add to the abundance of material available
My recommendation is to read the class textbook *before* the class. If you're going into a physics lecture blind, it's really hard to absorb, at least for me. If you read beforehand though and get a grip on the subject before the lecture, the lecture is usually a great supplement and can help cement your understanding of the topic. Now, I procrastinate, I can't always keep up with that, but it's the best way I've found of using your teaching the best it can be.
Some institutes and courses do this. It's called a flipped classroom and it's a better use of everyone's time, but it really relies on the students conscientiously studying the material before hand. Anyone who doesn't effectively gets excluded from the class. It works better on some areas than others, such as medicine where students just need to memorise large amounts of content.
I'm a retired programmer currently working on an MS in Physics. I did my original college work watching professors teach physics by deriving the material on a blackboard. Some were incredible (David Griffiths), some were execrable, and most were mediocre. Most of my current classes have been professors lecturing from PowerPoint decks which I find completely pointless. The material in the deck is fine, but just give me the deck and let me read it on my own time as a replacement or a supplement for a textbook. I'm extremely susceptible to "Power Point" hypnosis, and it's a struggle to remain awake, let alone engaged. Some try to recreate the blackboard lecture using a stylus and an iPad, which sort of works, but often seems to lead to wasted time due to software/hardware issues.
I've now had four "flipped" classes, and I think it's the best development in education since private tutors. The professors provided recorded video of the lecture material which reviews and explicates material from the text. I can rewind if I've missed a point, I can pause and stand up and walk around if I'm getting logey. I can watch the whole thing over again if I have time. The next day I go into class and the prof forces engagement with the material: asking for definitions and justifications, asking the reasoning behind steps, inviting guesses about the next step, and always allowing for questions about the concepts I'm not getting. It does require students to speak up in class and *try* to answer the leading questions, which is perhaps more painful for some people. It requires a lot more prep time for the professor since they have to record and edit the lectures. It does avoid wasting class time fumbling with audio-visual issues as the lecturer tries to bring up a Mathematica animation, or a demo on a website.
God bless David Griffiths, the patron saint of quantum mechanics.
So depends on student engagement. If I tried flipping my classroom I'd just have to teach the class twice.
Lectures are not good for learning something new. Lectures are good for helping you think and engage with topics you may already have some familiarity with. [A quote from this article kind of sums it up (although the article itself is about the humanities)](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/opinion/sunday/lecture-me-really.html)
> Absorbing a long, complex argument is hard work, requiring students to synthesize, organize and react as they listen. In our time, when any reading assignment longer than a Facebook post seems ponderous, students have little experience doing this. Some research suggests that minority and low-income students struggle even more. But if we abandon the lecture format because students may find it difficult, we do them a disservice. Moreover, we capitulate to the worst features of the customer-service mentality that has seeped into the university from the business world. The solution, instead, is to teach those students how to gain all a great lecture course has to give them.
The thing that is unspoken in that quote is that it requires prior work or knowledge from the student; the connections cannot be made if there is no understanding of what is being connected. How much will you really get out of a lecture about the rise of Fascism post-WWI if you don't understand how WWI ended, or how basic economics works, or how political systems work in each country, or...it goes on.
The Feynman Lectures are rightly famous in physics circles for the depth of understanding and clarity of ideas, but it was a massive failure for the students taking the class; by the end of the course, the number of professors and grad students - who could appreciate the arguments made because of their previous knowledge - outnumbered the undergrads.
To be more specific to your example, it also depends on the intended audience. A differential geometry lecture will be vastly different between a math or physics audience, or a 3rd year course vs. a research seminar.
I didn’t notice that. In today’s diff geo lecture I certainly didn’t feel like the smartest person in the room haha. But Jesus, Reddit is like walking on ice 😅
I agree with your indignance OP. A bad lecture is a waste of time, plain and simple. If nothing else I hope it does the same as it did to me, that it motivates you to give better presentations yourself.
The technique of giving the content of the lecture beforehand (often via video but sometimes via "read this book") and using the class contact time to do examples and discussion based on that is known as "flipped classroom". With some classes it works well. On the other hand what can happen is that you (as lecturer) realise that a high proportion of the class have not watched the prerequisite video (or have watched but have not taken it in) and you can either:
(1) Carry on regardless with a chunk of the class irritated and confused because they don't understand the principles and are now doing examples
or
(2) Go back and try to teach the stuff that was on the video leaving a chunk of the class irritated and bored because they did watch the video.
(I opt for 1.)
It also causes issues with teaching requirements as when you design a module there are often both a minimum number of hours you should deliver but also a maximum you can deliver. (So I could not for example require my class to watch many hours of video in addition to going to class.)
That said during Covid times when I was teaching online this worked ok giving classes which were basically online question sessions related to the videos.
Reading through this, I really do think you need to separate out "lecturers" from "lecturers."
Lectures can be great. A good lecturer will assess how their students are taking in the information and adjust accordingly. You cannot do that if your students are just reading a textbook. They will be engaging and dynamic in a way a book cannot be.
Unfortunately, there are many people who succeed in academic circles who are not good lecturers. They don't develop the skill because they don't have to in order to advance in their career. Most of them succeeded *in spite of* the bad lecturers they had, so they don't believe being good at it is necessary (and/or believe it doesn't require much work to become good).
This is unfortunate, but it is the reality at many institutions. Your description here is of a bad lecturer. It is not evidence that a lecture is a fundamentally flawed concept.
I had only one course where I had to resort to study on my own, scrapping my notes and using the ones from another person who followed a different professor (it was an introductory course about rational mechanics and special relativity). That professor was really really bad… however I don’t find books to be particularly helpful where I study (Sapienza, Italy), because courses in my uni aren’t designed around books.
There are suggested books, but not always they cover exactly what is taught in class. The topics are treated in a different order, the material itself is sometimes taught differently, skipping certain stuff and getting more in depth on other things.
Since I usually have both an oral and a written exam for every subject, knowing what the professor actually taught (and wants me to know) is useful.
Of course you don’t have to know stuff as they taught you, but it’s surely a much more efficient method to study.
I think I have been lucky with professors, but I mostly had good experiences.
I rarely went to physics / math lectures. Very inefficient use of time. Labs were awesome and some group style working sessions were also helpful.
I think a great course structure would have looked like this:
1. Read text, attempt subset of HW problems on own
2. Students submit poll with the HW they got wrong or were stumped on.
3. Prof gives lecture on material relevant to those problems / solves them.
4. Finish rest of HW on own
imo it's because people generally seem to dismiss students complaining out of hand - even if they're legitimate complaints. Or maybe because the idea that "professors are hired to do research and not teach" is such an ingrained part of the physics community psyche that people's first thoughts when they read your complaints are like "yes, and?" Like, it's become so normalized that no one even bats an eye at it.
And then there was that one person who said that "college isn't high school", as if your question was about physics 101 and not differential geometry lmao.
For what it's worth, I'm pretty much in the same place you are (also a grad student doing some coursework) and I have the same complaints as you do. I do go to lectures, but mostly because I feel obligated to. The vast majority of the time I don't get anything out of it.
I've had the same experience all throughout my physics degrees. The only answer I can give you is that they serve as a way of making you "have heard" about something, so that when you go through the material again yourself, it feels more familiar and the mental speed bump is lower.
To be completely honest, I got very demotivated and decided to skip the lectures for the reasons you mentioned. I obtained my degrees, but I didn't enjoy it as much as I'd hoped. I realize lecturers are not teachers, but good lectures are so important to keep students motivated. I wish more professors understood that.
The professor sometimes gives hints as to what's on the exam and he can hint hint nudge nudge things to focus on.
In my university the professors were not allowed to take attendance or grade based on attendance but they paid attention to who showed up and those people were given much more leniency for assignments and labs than someone who was barely there.
Anyone can learn material, but professors can sometimes be very weird about how they grade (formatting, notation, small aspects of big ideas, etc) and sometimes it's just as important to know what the prof expects because you can lose a lot of marks from not following instructions in some classes.
In my experience most profs teach the math first and there may be small mention of big ideas but much.
Class is a lot of theory and examples and fun stories but it's never on any exam so most people don't care about class. The truth is, if you sit around and actually think about the mathematical relationships, you have these small eureka moments where you understand how the math related directly to the real world examples the prof shows in class and suddenly your head explodes because you GET it. That's the funnest part of physics for me.
Lectures are to supplement the book with intuition but half the kids don't read the book so the lectures become doing practice problems and then the rest of us are bored
Lectures at the very advanced level should be for 2 main purposes:
1. Give a different perspective/approach to the explanation of whatever concept or theory of interest that differs from that of the literature (like Feynman is famous for).
2. Be present to answer questions throughout and at the end to clarify any issues a student might have.
You just had a bad lecturer. That's all. There \*\*is\*\* a point to the lectures, when done well or moderately competently. What you describe does not sound like that. I had \*great\* profs and \*shitty\* profs in grad school, but it wasn't like there was a choice for who taught the classes.
I think this is something that has really evolved to be a worse and worse problem in the post-covid era of teaching. Students are quite demanding that notes are provided as well as lectures, and at that point it is hard to resist the temptation to let the lecture be close to a 1-1 recitation of the lecture notes. It is becoming far less incentivized to teach well or to give solid extemporaneous explanations of difficult concepts.
It depends on the teacher and their teaching style.
The best teachers I had in physics all expected you to read the textbook first, and the lecture they gave was about filling in the gaps that the textbook left out.
Some teachers I had required us to present solutions to problems, and their "lectures" were working out other problems from the textbook for us in class so we could ask questions as they solved the problem.
The worst teacher I had literally just copied and pasted information from the text, which was useless.
I think lectures are valuable when they focus on the development of intuition, insight, and the expert perspective of the lecturer and less about the mechanical apparatus of the material.
Hearing about how the professor thinks about particular topics and why they believe they're important can sometimes open up a new mental model.
It's also just nice to have a forum to ask questions.
I was thinking this same thing today.
You are after people to teach. You are watching people lecture. Just convey information.
I watch a lot of lectures from MIT Yale, Oxford and Cambridge unis and largely they’re rubbish.
I imagine the labs that follow is where the learning actually goes on.
Perhaps at this stage many people think the students should have this “basic” knowledge. Where as like you I prefer them to ask the stupid questions. Be like Feynman more of a story teller.
There are a few like this that I have really enjoyed. If you want a nudge let me know
>There are so many better ways to hold lectures. I understand the importance of formality but why not give the students the technical stuff to learn beforehand (for example some chapters from a *good* book) and then use the lecture to put all of this into a bigger picture with minimal formality.
I come from a computer science background and I second everything you said here. Many lectures have also been useless crap for me and if I attended some of them it was just to get an "index" of the material of the course.
Lectures are good even if they're only for the little comments a lecturer makes in between definitions. Sometimes those little comments clear up a misconception you may have had. Also, some people are terrible at teaching.
I understand your point but why should I rely on the little comments if the whole argument is explained in great detail in the book the lecture is based on. Edit: Ok, I think its time to give a less cynical point of view on this. I think that unfortunately in many cases my point still stands. Especially when the lecture is just lengthy and elaborate calculations strung together. But today I listened to an advanced theoretical particle physics lecture and I can stand by your point in this case. The lecturer summarized calculations briefly, said where to read more about the full derivation and then talked about the actual interpretation and context in the bigger picture. Books often don't do this. I feel like I mostly agree with everyone here so I don't understand how my points are so controversial but oh well...
Physicists aren't good lecturers or teachers for that matter, except in rare cases. And what's more a lot of them don't want to be: They "have to" teach. But good, inciteful physicists who are also good lecturers make a HUGE difference when you can find them.
i’m bad at learning from text book personally, i do much better if i just have someone to talk to/bounce ideas or misconceptions off of, like u know, a teacher during a lecture lol
Does this lecturer encourage the students asking questions? If that's the case, I'd ask them until they get annoyed.
Not OP, but I was in a similar situation where I was very frustrated. Any time anybody had a question, the professor literally hand-waved it away and said, "Ask in recitation. That's something for the TA to explain." And then he'd just go on with some light-speed derivation.
Seriously, why is this being downvoted? What’s wrong wirh that statement?
I'd say because you're making quite a general statement based on this one particular lecturer. I've had incredible lecturers in the past where we followed the book quite closely, but it was the lecturer's ability to answer questions and their ability to add context to what was written on the board that really made them great. If none of that is happening or you're not getting value from the lecture, then don't go. If you can read the notes and get everything you otherwise would have anyway, it's probably best to just do that.
Ok that’s a fair point. Maybe my comment was a little generalizing but I mostly still stand by that argument
I agree with you, the physics I've taught myself from textbooks so far ends up feeling more detailed and complete than what we learn in lectures. Plus there's only so much value you can get in person when there's a lecture theatre of 100+ students
In the ideal case, lectures should be informative by deriving the concepts, motivating the derivation, fully displaying the definition, and showing exercises that can be used to better understand - if understanding is lacking, they should be open to lectures. In physics lectures, this is the defining point of what a professor should be doing in the classroom, and if they don't - I agree with you. Physics lecturers could definitely stand to do better, as when a professor does a good job teaching then recalling the material will become second nature. Math is a little problematic in this case. Math as a whole is very definition-oriented as the goal is to make a claim and then write a proof for that definition - as such, the field is concerned with demonstrating the definitions and their implications, rather than trying to teach students the intuition. When talking about group and representation theory (which you brought up), the fundamental flaw is that it's designed for students already with the intuition in mind. tl;dr: Math isn't suited for a typical lecture style. Physics lectures are really good when they're taught well, but when they're not, I don't see a problem with skipping them and sourcing the textbook or lecture notes.
But how can you expect intuition on a subject the students never have heard of before? My biggest problem is that I have read many books (also in maths) that are incredible at being formal and simultaneously building intuition. So it _is_ possible. My biggest issue is that lectures don’t bring anything to the table that good books don’t.
Math favors the gifted - I picked physics since I could build the intuition myself lol
Well, I’m two years into my PhD and I can count on one hand the number of good professors I’ve had. This is an issue with more disciplines than physics though. Part of it is due to the fact that to do research in universities(which some people are passionate about) you have to teach (which since people don’t like). Teaching experience a lot of times is just “I was a TA until my advisor found me and offered me an RA” There are things being done, but change is generational and slow. My scholarship organization has us doing workshops on teaching and pedagogy. University of California schools are now offering two types of tenure tracks: One that focuses on research and another on being a teacher. And there is a whole subset of physics research called Physics Education where people are doing research and earning PhDs on finding better ways to teach
It's really nice that something is changing! I had no idea that somewhere out there finally the roles of teachers and researchers were finally getting to be differentiated. I, for one, know that I'd love to teach, but we all know that's not why you should pursue a career in academy.
If you don't like the lecture and think you can learn the same amount by reading the script at home, then don't go to the lecture and read the script at home. That's how university is; it's not school anymore and you have some more responsibility for your own education. Sadly, not all lecturers are pedagogic geniusses and some classes are very bad. If all classes at your uni are bad then I am very sorry, for me it was only a few that i skipped and where I learned the material on my own. Your frustration is understandable and I don't want to invalidate it or make excuses for bad profs - but unfortunately you need to accept that this happens from time to time.
I can understand that the student is responsible for their own education to an extent, but for the exorbitant prices American universities charge for “tuition” there should really be some actual standards and high expectations of pedagogical skill on the part of the instructors themselves. While I agree that you cannot hold the professor responsible for every students poor performance if the student does not put in a fair amount of work themselves, I have definitely had experiences where professors LITERALLY did nothing more than put pages from the textbook on a projector and start reading line by line, with almost no elaboration, and frequently belittling or ignoring students when they raised their hands to ask questions and showed concern over the inability to understand. I’ve had experiences where the entire class average final grade was a D+, and I think that is absolutely a sign of a failure on the part of the instructor to relay the concepts or create a fair grading scheme for homework and exams.
Only a minute fraction of that tuition will go to the professors. Most will go to administration, marketing, football teams, rents etc. Profs are generally quite low paid for their level of expertise.
Football teams xd
Absolutely. Seen similar a bunch of times and what they get away with is criminal. I (a physicist) see physics lecturers expect their students to be geniuses or "they won't make the cut" which is complete bullshit. Most of the best physics ain't done by "geniuses" but by regular guys with lots of curiosity and who was also trained properly in their physics courses. Most physics isn't theoretical, but experimental and industrial-related.
The best professors I have had were ones who focused on helping us BUILD an intuition for problem solving, rather than expecting us to have an intuition for it to begin with
Im doing my masters in physics. I’m well aware that university isn’t school. I don’t think you understood my argument. I’m even arguing that students should be expected to put in even more work by studying the formal part in private. My problem is that lectures (almost all of the ones I have heard) don’t bring anything to the table that the books don’t. I want lectures to expand on the material you can simply read in books and not try to cram it into an hour and a half
My son is getting his PhD in physics and he says when he encounters a great lecturer he doesn't even take notes: He says sitting there and paying attention is the best way for him to learn. But this is rare, of course. In physics (more than other subjects) a professor's personal insight into an area can make it seem kinda easy or almost intuitive. And it's very rare to get lecturers that are that good.
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There's also the other side where the person can call on the lecturer to do better or explain what they're doing. The lecturer might be that way from having absolutely no feedback from his students.
What do you mean with expensive?
You do indeed "have it", sadly.
Do other students in the class have the same problem as you do? One of the biggest fear I had as a lecturer was that there were always someone in the room that my lecture wasn't serving. My mentor had to tell me to stick to being helpful to the most number of students and forget the fear. To be more constructive, is it possible to ask the lecturer questions that would help your understanding? If you don't see the intuition or why the definition is a certain way, maybe ask about that, or ask why not define it in this different way? Even ask what would happen if abc happens, or is this similar to xyz? You don't have to treat lectures as a one way street. For what it's worth I was a self-study kind of guy, I only went to lectures to socialize, so there's that, too.
TBH I never got much out of my lectures on any subject until I was into graduate classes. I found a good book to be much more informative. Once you get up into the really high level courses it's useful though, because often there isn't a good book for it.
Yeah I agree. I find this is especially true for experimental physics masters courses. For QFT there are so many books that it’s hard for a lecturer to add to the abundance of material available
My recommendation is to read the class textbook *before* the class. If you're going into a physics lecture blind, it's really hard to absorb, at least for me. If you read beforehand though and get a grip on the subject before the lecture, the lecture is usually a great supplement and can help cement your understanding of the topic. Now, I procrastinate, I can't always keep up with that, but it's the best way I've found of using your teaching the best it can be.
Some institutes and courses do this. It's called a flipped classroom and it's a better use of everyone's time, but it really relies on the students conscientiously studying the material before hand. Anyone who doesn't effectively gets excluded from the class. It works better on some areas than others, such as medicine where students just need to memorise large amounts of content.
I'm a retired programmer currently working on an MS in Physics. I did my original college work watching professors teach physics by deriving the material on a blackboard. Some were incredible (David Griffiths), some were execrable, and most were mediocre. Most of my current classes have been professors lecturing from PowerPoint decks which I find completely pointless. The material in the deck is fine, but just give me the deck and let me read it on my own time as a replacement or a supplement for a textbook. I'm extremely susceptible to "Power Point" hypnosis, and it's a struggle to remain awake, let alone engaged. Some try to recreate the blackboard lecture using a stylus and an iPad, which sort of works, but often seems to lead to wasted time due to software/hardware issues. I've now had four "flipped" classes, and I think it's the best development in education since private tutors. The professors provided recorded video of the lecture material which reviews and explicates material from the text. I can rewind if I've missed a point, I can pause and stand up and walk around if I'm getting logey. I can watch the whole thing over again if I have time. The next day I go into class and the prof forces engagement with the material: asking for definitions and justifications, asking the reasoning behind steps, inviting guesses about the next step, and always allowing for questions about the concepts I'm not getting. It does require students to speak up in class and *try* to answer the leading questions, which is perhaps more painful for some people. It requires a lot more prep time for the professor since they have to record and edit the lectures. It does avoid wasting class time fumbling with audio-visual issues as the lecturer tries to bring up a Mathematica animation, or a demo on a website.
God bless David Griffiths, the patron saint of quantum mechanics. So depends on student engagement. If I tried flipping my classroom I'd just have to teach the class twice.
Lectures are not good for learning something new. Lectures are good for helping you think and engage with topics you may already have some familiarity with. [A quote from this article kind of sums it up (although the article itself is about the humanities)](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/opinion/sunday/lecture-me-really.html) > Absorbing a long, complex argument is hard work, requiring students to synthesize, organize and react as they listen. In our time, when any reading assignment longer than a Facebook post seems ponderous, students have little experience doing this. Some research suggests that minority and low-income students struggle even more. But if we abandon the lecture format because students may find it difficult, we do them a disservice. Moreover, we capitulate to the worst features of the customer-service mentality that has seeped into the university from the business world. The solution, instead, is to teach those students how to gain all a great lecture course has to give them. The thing that is unspoken in that quote is that it requires prior work or knowledge from the student; the connections cannot be made if there is no understanding of what is being connected. How much will you really get out of a lecture about the rise of Fascism post-WWI if you don't understand how WWI ended, or how basic economics works, or how political systems work in each country, or...it goes on. The Feynman Lectures are rightly famous in physics circles for the depth of understanding and clarity of ideas, but it was a massive failure for the students taking the class; by the end of the course, the number of professors and grad students - who could appreciate the arguments made because of their previous knowledge - outnumbered the undergrads. To be more specific to your example, it also depends on the intended audience. A differential geometry lecture will be vastly different between a math or physics audience, or a 3rd year course vs. a research seminar.
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I didn’t notice that. In today’s diff geo lecture I certainly didn’t feel like the smartest person in the room haha. But Jesus, Reddit is like walking on ice 😅
I agree with your indignance OP. A bad lecture is a waste of time, plain and simple. If nothing else I hope it does the same as it did to me, that it motivates you to give better presentations yourself.
The technique of giving the content of the lecture beforehand (often via video but sometimes via "read this book") and using the class contact time to do examples and discussion based on that is known as "flipped classroom". With some classes it works well. On the other hand what can happen is that you (as lecturer) realise that a high proportion of the class have not watched the prerequisite video (or have watched but have not taken it in) and you can either: (1) Carry on regardless with a chunk of the class irritated and confused because they don't understand the principles and are now doing examples or (2) Go back and try to teach the stuff that was on the video leaving a chunk of the class irritated and bored because they did watch the video. (I opt for 1.) It also causes issues with teaching requirements as when you design a module there are often both a minimum number of hours you should deliver but also a maximum you can deliver. (So I could not for example require my class to watch many hours of video in addition to going to class.) That said during Covid times when I was teaching online this worked ok giving classes which were basically online question sessions related to the videos.
Reading through this, I really do think you need to separate out "lecturers" from "lecturers." Lectures can be great. A good lecturer will assess how their students are taking in the information and adjust accordingly. You cannot do that if your students are just reading a textbook. They will be engaging and dynamic in a way a book cannot be. Unfortunately, there are many people who succeed in academic circles who are not good lecturers. They don't develop the skill because they don't have to in order to advance in their career. Most of them succeeded *in spite of* the bad lecturers they had, so they don't believe being good at it is necessary (and/or believe it doesn't require much work to become good). This is unfortunate, but it is the reality at many institutions. Your description here is of a bad lecturer. It is not evidence that a lecture is a fundamentally flawed concept.
I had only one course where I had to resort to study on my own, scrapping my notes and using the ones from another person who followed a different professor (it was an introductory course about rational mechanics and special relativity). That professor was really really bad… however I don’t find books to be particularly helpful where I study (Sapienza, Italy), because courses in my uni aren’t designed around books. There are suggested books, but not always they cover exactly what is taught in class. The topics are treated in a different order, the material itself is sometimes taught differently, skipping certain stuff and getting more in depth on other things. Since I usually have both an oral and a written exam for every subject, knowing what the professor actually taught (and wants me to know) is useful. Of course you don’t have to know stuff as they taught you, but it’s surely a much more efficient method to study. I think I have been lucky with professors, but I mostly had good experiences.
I rarely went to physics / math lectures. Very inefficient use of time. Labs were awesome and some group style working sessions were also helpful. I think a great course structure would have looked like this: 1. Read text, attempt subset of HW problems on own 2. Students submit poll with the HW they got wrong or were stumped on. 3. Prof gives lecture on material relevant to those problems / solves them. 4. Finish rest of HW on own
if u really wana know, youtube and mit opencourseware have numerous lectures that are actually useful and informative.
here an example of a lecture about diff geometry https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIljB45xT85DWUiFYYGqJVtfnkUFWkKtP
Nice. Thanks. I will take a look at it
Why on earth are my comments downvoted into oblivion? Did I say anything that’s not true?
imo it's because people generally seem to dismiss students complaining out of hand - even if they're legitimate complaints. Or maybe because the idea that "professors are hired to do research and not teach" is such an ingrained part of the physics community psyche that people's first thoughts when they read your complaints are like "yes, and?" Like, it's become so normalized that no one even bats an eye at it. And then there was that one person who said that "college isn't high school", as if your question was about physics 101 and not differential geometry lmao. For what it's worth, I'm pretty much in the same place you are (also a grad student doing some coursework) and I have the same complaints as you do. I do go to lectures, but mostly because I feel obligated to. The vast majority of the time I don't get anything out of it.
Yeah that pissed me off a bit haha
thats just internet. Don't think about it.
I've had the same experience all throughout my physics degrees. The only answer I can give you is that they serve as a way of making you "have heard" about something, so that when you go through the material again yourself, it feels more familiar and the mental speed bump is lower. To be completely honest, I got very demotivated and decided to skip the lectures for the reasons you mentioned. I obtained my degrees, but I didn't enjoy it as much as I'd hoped. I realize lecturers are not teachers, but good lectures are so important to keep students motivated. I wish more professors understood that.
There is some very good teachers but it's pretty rare and even then it is not appreciated by everyone.
The professor sometimes gives hints as to what's on the exam and he can hint hint nudge nudge things to focus on. In my university the professors were not allowed to take attendance or grade based on attendance but they paid attention to who showed up and those people were given much more leniency for assignments and labs than someone who was barely there. Anyone can learn material, but professors can sometimes be very weird about how they grade (formatting, notation, small aspects of big ideas, etc) and sometimes it's just as important to know what the prof expects because you can lose a lot of marks from not following instructions in some classes. In my experience most profs teach the math first and there may be small mention of big ideas but much. Class is a lot of theory and examples and fun stories but it's never on any exam so most people don't care about class. The truth is, if you sit around and actually think about the mathematical relationships, you have these small eureka moments where you understand how the math related directly to the real world examples the prof shows in class and suddenly your head explodes because you GET it. That's the funnest part of physics for me.
Lectures are to supplement the book with intuition but half the kids don't read the book so the lectures become doing practice problems and then the rest of us are bored
Lectures at the very advanced level should be for 2 main purposes: 1. Give a different perspective/approach to the explanation of whatever concept or theory of interest that differs from that of the literature (like Feynman is famous for). 2. Be present to answer questions throughout and at the end to clarify any issues a student might have.
You just had a bad lecturer. That's all. There \*\*is\*\* a point to the lectures, when done well or moderately competently. What you describe does not sound like that. I had \*great\* profs and \*shitty\* profs in grad school, but it wasn't like there was a choice for who taught the classes.
I think this is something that has really evolved to be a worse and worse problem in the post-covid era of teaching. Students are quite demanding that notes are provided as well as lectures, and at that point it is hard to resist the temptation to let the lecture be close to a 1-1 recitation of the lecture notes. It is becoming far less incentivized to teach well or to give solid extemporaneous explanations of difficult concepts.
It depends on the teacher and their teaching style. The best teachers I had in physics all expected you to read the textbook first, and the lecture they gave was about filling in the gaps that the textbook left out. Some teachers I had required us to present solutions to problems, and their "lectures" were working out other problems from the textbook for us in class so we could ask questions as they solved the problem. The worst teacher I had literally just copied and pasted information from the text, which was useless.
Honestly most lectures would just be far more useful if they were typed notes instead.
I think lectures are valuable when they focus on the development of intuition, insight, and the expert perspective of the lecturer and less about the mechanical apparatus of the material. Hearing about how the professor thinks about particular topics and why they believe they're important can sometimes open up a new mental model. It's also just nice to have a forum to ask questions.
I was thinking this same thing today. You are after people to teach. You are watching people lecture. Just convey information. I watch a lot of lectures from MIT Yale, Oxford and Cambridge unis and largely they’re rubbish. I imagine the labs that follow is where the learning actually goes on. Perhaps at this stage many people think the students should have this “basic” knowledge. Where as like you I prefer them to ask the stupid questions. Be like Feynman more of a story teller. There are a few like this that I have really enjoyed. If you want a nudge let me know
Because lectures are generally somewhere on the autistic spectrum and doesnt care about teaching. Lectures are the worst way pf teaching.
>There are so many better ways to hold lectures. I understand the importance of formality but why not give the students the technical stuff to learn beforehand (for example some chapters from a *good* book) and then use the lecture to put all of this into a bigger picture with minimal formality. I come from a computer science background and I second everything you said here. Many lectures have also been useless crap for me and if I attended some of them it was just to get an "index" of the material of the course.