more and less

It's no secret that educators interact differently with different types of students, especially those who are at different levels of maturity. However, I think a few teaching practices aimed at maximizing student absorption should be common at all academic levels, and that list should definitely include "encouraging student engagement". Students who aren't paying attention almost definitely won't learn what's being taught in the course (from the teacher, at least).. Making material accessible to the students in a verbal and visual way, on the other hand, allows their brains to forge some personal association with it. The more paths that information takes to travel to your brain, the better.

Engaging students, easier said than done, I know. Anyway, I'm not posting to preach about effective teaching techniques, but instead to document an observation, which struck me during Experimental Methods this morning. It is as follows: In high school, (my) teachers strove to engage students who were eager to learn. They called me at home, they dreamed up fun games to make lecture points stick, they spent extra time on a difficult topic when necessary. In undergrad, the tone changed, and most professors were less inclined to initiate personal relationships with their students. With a few notable exceptions like Roman Civ., the material being taught was more likely the glue that bonded me to my classes than the professor who taught it. (Admittedly, this could be a symptom of the classes I took, proportion of lectures to seminars and labs, etc.) Still, though, professors who knew their lecture material cold could grab their classes' attentions by posing questions and highlighting subtleties.

Here grad school, the professors teaching my classes largely ignore me. Even when I ask questions, even when I attend office hours (though they are usually very helpful). They have no impetus to engage me -- I'm in their class to help my research and edge me closer to a degree, and they know it. I wouldn't say that they disregard their students' interest in the material, but they just don't do much to encourage it. As in high school, I still seek the knowledge they offer.. but instead of providing me their wisdom with an open hand, my professors scrawl it in dry erase marker on the whiteboard and leave me scrambling to grab and organize it for myself. Where is their desire to pamper me along, to make sure I understand the material, to engender a passion in me for it, while my high school teachers were so eager to?

I know my professors here have less time to commit to students. I know that they have higher expectations of me than anyone has previously had, and that they assume I'm self-motivated enough to wrestle the material into submission by the mere nature of my enrollment in grad school. I'm just saying that a sliver of human expression in their lectures, maybe turning from their frantic writing on the board to deliver a relevant personal anecdote, would go a long way towards rekindling a passion for learning. Instead, classes often feel like a marathon to cram my head full of nature's fundamentals and mathematical approaches to modeling them. I wonder if others in my classes share the sentiment... Maybe school just doesn't come easy anymore, and I'm looking to blame the teachers.