Subj : Re: Good examples of programming course lecture notes To : comp.programming,comp.lang.java.programmer From : Oliver Wong Date : Fri Sep 23 2005 09:04 pm wrote in message news:1127121857.756235.142780@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com... > (ii) Make the students write notes. The slides are not complete. The > students are given basically blank paper formated with cross-references > to the slides. They wll have to write down what I say. Disclaimer: I was not a "typical" student, in any sense of the word. I studied in Quebec, Canada, where there is a level called "Cegep" which last 2 years in between of highschool and university. In highschool, I would essentially be told what to write down, and how to study, so I did what I was told to do, and went through highschool without much trouble. Cegep is supposed to be an intermediate between highschool and university, and thus there is less handholding. I had to figure out for myself what was important to take down as notes, and what was superfluous information. By the time I reached University, I had discovered what my learning style was: don't bother taking any notes. I realized while at Cegep that I would never bother to review my notes; it was like watching the same movie twice (something I rarely ever do); I already knew how it "ends", so the interest was simply not there for me. One semester, I had a professor who had slides with "blanks" that we had to "fill in", which would then be handed in and corrected as "participation marks". I was appalled. What next? Would he give us diagrams and crayons to colour them in with? I have nothing against other students who chose to take notes (whether they use crayons or otherwise). What I didn't appreciate was a professor thinking he knew the One Way of learning that was the Best for me. I've discovered on my own what works and doesn't work for me, and I'd rather not be forced to use a technique which simply doesn't work for me. wrote in message news:1127242097.794249.306630@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com... > There is also the major real-world problem that if notes are too > complete, then certain types of students will decide that they don't > need to attend lectures. Non-attendance at lectures has become a very > very major problem in the UK. In another semester, I took a course in abstract algebra (you know, group, rings, isomorphism, and all that stuff). The professor was very pedantic (even when one takes into account the subject matter he was teaching!) which some students disliked, but which I appreciated because it eliminated the potential for ambiguities that might have otherwise arisen if the professor had used "natural English". Unfortunately, as a side effect, the professor tended to be very verbose in his explanation of even the simplest concepts. And should a student ask a question which even hints at a minor misunderstanding, the professor would have to go over that section again, clarifying exactly what is meant by every word he used, and every character in the equation if appropriate. This is, I think, understandable given the subject matter. For example, one student had trouble understanding the difference between the empty set, and the set containing only the empty set, and while the difference, syntactically, might seem minor (i.e. "{}" versus "{{}}"), the semantic difference was great. So I'd quite frequently take naps during his lecture. Naps which could have lasted anywhere between 1 and 2 hours (the lectures themselves were 2 hours long). For all intents and purposes, I was not "attending" the lecture in any reasonable sense of the word. However, at the end, when I'd hear the rustling of students packing away their notes and getting ready to leave, I could wake up and look at the blackboard covered in formulae, read them from top to bottom, left to right, and grasp what topics were covered that day. I forget the exact grade I received for that class, though I suspect it was an A. It could not have been lower than a B-, at any rate. The morale of the anecdote, I guess, is that teachers should teach the subject of the course, rather than "baby-sit" the students on the path towards a diploma. What is important, in my opinion, is for the students to learn and understand the material, and only the student him or herself can actually determine whether he or she understood it. Needing to assign a "grade" or "score" to their "understanding" is just an unfortunate side effect of future employers wanting some sort of certificate confirming that said students really does have the understanding they claims that they do. - Oliver .