AMSTERDAM — When the staunchly traditional professor of my Culture and Citizenship class boldly announced last week that he would not use PowerPoints in his lectures, I felt a momentary short in the electronics of my brain.
No PowerPoint? Well, this guy is old.
But since listening to his half hour of reasons why “PowerPoint makes you stupid,” I have to agree that the tool developed to keep presentations on track has become one of many crutches educators use to hobble through our tutelage, particularly in large, low-level courses.
In classes containing more than about 30 students, instructors lose sight of the individuals. They use standardized teaching methods, assignments and assessments to impart information, and they’re wasting our time and our tuition.
Higher education has become more about the profitable business of quickly graduating mass quantities of students than about placing value in our diplomas. Being an alumna of the University will help me to get a job, but the things I’ve learned in class won’t help me to perform it.
University faculty are in a position to correct this unfortunate priority shift. They are the link between the student body and the administration. If professors do their jobs correctly, then students learn, progress in their degrees and graduate — win-win.
Boring, by-the-bullet-point lectures inspire the opposite. But with a high curve or mountains of mindless assignments, students can still progress in their degrees and graduate — but the students lose.
I know many people who dream to one day have the power of the teacher: to influence moldable minds, to teach critical thinking skills or to share information on a topic they feel passionate about. So what is it that turns eager teachers to-be into monotonous, apathetic and lazy professors?
Reflecting on my past seven semesters of college, the professors and instructors who have had the greatest effect on my education are the ones who understood their audience and customized their approach to meet and teach at the student level.
Some of them used PowerPoint. Some of them gave standardized department exams. But there was something about each one that made them approachable, relatable and engaging in the classroom.
These are the environments in which I passed feeling like a better human for having taken the class.
When I left the University to study abroad, I expected to encounter a palatable difference in teaching styles of LSU’s faculty and my international instructors. After attending five classes taught by about seven different teachers — mostly Dutch — I’m seeing more similarities than I expected.
Students everywhere are harboring more responsibility for teaching themselves as professors assign lengthy textbook readings and computer-based homework.
If it weren’t for the videos, tutorials and online resources of MyMathLab, I wouldn’t have passed LSU’s Introduction to Contemporary Mathematics. And if I hadn’t taken extensive personal time to outline my assigned readings, I’d be returning in the spring with a very sad-looking transcript.
Much like PowerPoint, these are tools that can be constructively used to reinforce lessons, or they can cheat students out of valuable, interpersonal teachings. It is unfortunate how often the latter is true.