Lecture

I have been giving a number of lectures recently. This is not to say that lecture is effective teaching. It almost never is. Some people like me, I have to say, don't do well during lectures and quickly doze off.

As far as education is concerned, nonetheless, lectures are forever the default mode and practicum little more than a footnote. Indeed, nearly 80 percent of college courses are simply lectures by professors, in a way that you may have been sleeping through most of the time. Only a saint wouldn't sleep during a lecture. Correction: only a dead saint wouldn't sleep in front of a bloody boring lecturer (and it's hard to see how I can be anything else).

Did I mention the guilty lecturer (who has no excuse not to)? To please myself and make the students feel less miserable, I decided to put up my first PowerPoint slide quoting Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard. By the end of a lecture, according to his book Our Underachieving Colleges, a student remembers just less than half of what was taught. Only a week later, that number is down to a stunning rate of 20%.