What is the point of professors and lectures

[CosmicKitten]

I live in a group home for mentally retarded people. My social worker is incompetent and does not even want me in college. I at least have the freedom to study whatever I want all day and I do even though it means cutting down on other things I like to do like fan fiction and making videos and even though I have the time it kills me that I cannot concentrate on studying, working through problems or whatever for 12 hours straight. Even while I read my mind will be thinking of something else and I will finish the passage and realize it was all a feat of hyperlexia. The noise in my mind is louder than what the teachers say. I have a problem with interrupting without even thinking about it when I am talking and the same goes with my thinking, I sometimes listen to only part of a lecture (now it's a really good day when I AM listening) or reading part of a book when my mind sort of autocompletes it, even though I know it would encourage those bad traits you speak of in normal people, I think with my kind of autocompleting mind I would probably benefit just from being given the equations straight off the bat because if I have to search or whatever my mind will wander off and that isn't very efficient. I didn't like that in school though I was expected to just memorize the equations or write them on a sheet and not think about more advanced stuff (which I really process better in my head than when I'm in social mode, when I'm talking I'm not listening and often not thinking) and that's part of why I quit. I don't know what to do now, I wonder if I could get into a private school on an art scholarship and then switch majors or would they not allow that?

 

[Choppy]

I just want to know how normal people think and what their learning differences are and well I think I have learned plenty on how people think today. I actually have a very conservative estimate of my own abilities thank you. The pack mentality displayed here is so... typical.

I don't claim to be an expert in autism, but from my very limited understanding, one problem autistic people face is understanding how other people might see the world in a way that's different from their own. The example that I remember is if you take an autistic child into a separate room from a friend of his, open a box that has a toy in it and then ask if his friend will know what is in the box, he will be more likely than a non-autistic child to think his friend will also know.

It's tempting to see the original post as the work of a conceited individual who doesn't believe he or she needs lectures or courses. But I might guess, or at least offer the benefit of doubt to the idea that this is a question coming from someone who (a) learns better from reading and (b) has difficulty understanding the point of current teaching methods. To this end I would offer the following points.

1. The educational system we have right now is not perfect and no one claims that it is. It is the result of history. Lectures go right back to the time of Socrates... probably even to our tribal ancestry when people would share knowledge around the campfire. Universities evolved largely from religious establishments - in which larger groups of illiterate people would gather to hear whatever the literate "establishments" wanted to tell them. We now live in a society where the majority of people are both literate and have unprecedented access to information.

2. Academic degrees are not more important than knowledge. The pragmatic issue at hand is that people have no way of understanding what someone else knows simply by looking at them, or even talking to them for short periods of time. But knowing the extent of someone's knowledge can be extremely important - for example, when deciding how much weight to give their advice on which medicine to take, whether or not its a good idea to strap yourself into a high velocity mechanical contraption they've built, or even whether you should hire them to accomplish certain tasks. The best way we have to measure someone's knowledge in a field is to test it and then establish a system of certification.

3. There are efforts underway to improve teaching and learning methods. My understanding is that it's only fairly recent - say in the last 40 years or so - that we've begun to understand that different people learn in different ways. So some students like the original poster, may actually learn best from being given brief, dry descriptions of a subject and then given problem sets. While others need to be entertained with the dry material thrown in here and there. This doesn't offer much consolation to those in the first group who have to suffer through classes designed to appeal to the second group, but it is, at least an explanation.

4. It's also important to recognize that individual's needs change. When learning at the high-school and early university level, I probably learned better through reading. (I would never have admitted that however. I was afraid to miss any lectures, just in case I missed the one where professor says, "Okay, now that we've covered the background, let's look a the equations we need for time travel.") But as I went on, I needed the lecture more for a number of reasons. First, the quality of textbooks wasn't always great (perhaps showing my age, but at the time very little was available online). Second, the professors would often tell you things that weren't in the textbooks, make connections with other material, hint at what might be on an exam.

5. Finally, in my experience, in order to advance and do any kind of research, you need to enjoy sitting through talks. When you go to a conference for example, you could find yourself sitting through hours and hours or research summaries, standing and listening to people present posters, taking refresher courses, etc. If this is a chore for you, rather than a joy, (and I freely admit I've sat through may presentations that were more chore than joy), chances are you're going to struggle in academia.

 

[CosmicKitten]

Choppy - thank you, you pretty much hit the nail on the head with everything. Just dry material and problem sets, no entertainment, no frills, got enough of that going on in my head thank you very much.

I'm afraid I wouldn't enjoy the talks though. Even if it's something interesting, well, I went to a math convention one time and I got a splitting headache from sitting in the room and I had to sit outside.

 

[Evo]

Enough.