I boneheadedly missed a week (or 2?) keeping up with this lecture series. Here’s the third lecture from David Archer’s University of Chicago class, Phy Sci 134 – based on his book, “Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast” – one of the key books for understanding the larger picture.
Atmospheric physics for poets.
Yuck. I suffered through the first three minutes of this lecture and then quit in disgust. This guy couldn’t lecture his way out of a paper bag. He doesn’t make solid eye contact, he doesn’t use his voice effectively, his gestures suck, and his body language is confusing. He relies too heavily on his notes — if he had a good plan for his lecture, he would not have needed to consult his notes so often. And there’s no clear overall strategy. He starts off by talking about what he talked about previously — if they got it, he doesn’t need to review it, and if they didn’t, repeating it now won’t fix it.
His discussion of heat is useless — who cares that heat is just the motion of molecules? Sure, scientists do, but you don’t need to know that to understand climate change. You need only know that heat is the form of energy that we experience as temperature. And talking about light as a wave! C’mon, that’s irrelevant to the subject. Yes, it’s true, but that doesn’t make it part of the lesson. And he tops it off with a mention of neutrinos! Good lord, does this guy have ANY appreciation of what’s at work with climate change?!?!?!
That’s were I got made and shut it off. I’m sure he knows his stuff, and I’m sure that he means well, but this guy is no teacher.
Odd comment. Only watched a short bit, seems great. No eye contact? You know there’s an actual class in the lecture hall, right? His voice is also really clear. Did we watch something different?
I also think that level of detail is exactly what’s needed given the fact that some people are still propounding `theories’ that claim to overturn the greenhouse effect – and doing so with more-or-less fictional physics.
Though having just started watching lecture 2, they could have done some editing! The first 3 minutes is all course-related bumph. Lecture 1 is ALL course-related bumph…
Well, there is some eye contact with the audience, but he spends a great deal of time looking down or aside. It is necessary, sometimes, when collecting one’s thoughts, to glance away from the audience for a second, but this guy engages in it far too much. I suspect that he failed to put much effort into planning the lecture; it smells to me as if he scribbled down some notes and then just walked in and started talking. That’s an abuse of people’s time. My calculation is simple: if I’m going to lecture to 100 people for one hour, then they’re giving me 100 person-hours of their time, and a due respect for others implies that I should spend 100 person-hours preparing the lecture. I never actually go that far, but for most lectures I expend at least 5% as much time as my audience expends, and for important lectures, that goes up to 20%.
The guy used a chalkboard — what crap! Yes, I used chalkboards back in the days when they were the only available means, but chalkboards are bad, bad news. You have to look away from the audience to use a chalkboard; that shatters your contact with them. It’s faster, easier, and more effective to put that junk down on a slide. True, Powerpoint presentations are greatly abused, but if you have to present text to the audience, a slide beats all heck out of a chalkboard scribble.
The relationship between the quality of most lecturing these days and what could easily be achieved with just a few hours of effort is akin to the relationship between MS-DOS and modern graphical user interfaces. The fact that people are able to get away with such crap these days is a measure of just how troglodytic academia can be.
I watched the series last year, and also got the book so I can work on the answers to understand the material. Dr. Archer was kind enough to email me his pdf of the answers too so I could check my answers against his. If you go through all the lectures, do the questions in the book, you’ll have got a full university course for free. Seems rather churlish to complain about that.
One thing I used to tell my students was something along the lines of, You’re in university now. The difference between high school and university is that the onus is now on you to learn the material. Your professors are not trained as teachers–fortunately many of them can teach–but if you have ones who cannot teach well, then it is your responsibility to learn the material anyway. We are scientists and researchers, not teachers, and while we’ll do our best to share our enthusiasm and love of our subject, we expect you to do the learning regardless of whether or not we’re capable of being good teachers.
Then I’d rattle off a list of my horror profs who couldn’t teach–e.g. the one who spoke in an accent so thick no-one could understand him (fortunately, he read straight from the biochem textbook so we just highlighted whatever he was reading). Or the one who said, “uhhhhh”, every fourth word. Or the one who didn’t think in a linear fashion and so his lectures constantly introduced material that required advanced courses to understand (those of us who passed did so by reading the textbook almost cover to cover, and by the end of the year we were able to appreciate his unique genius in how he tied together so many different threads of thought–although we still wished he wouldn’t jump all over the place from what seemed to be non-sequitor to non-sequitor).
I though it was a great lecture.
I guess it depends whether you’re expecting to be entertained, or whether you’re wanting an opportunity to put in some effort and grasp some abstract but revolutionary scientific ideas.
I’ve learned a massive amount from lecturers far less eloquent and far less entertaining than this guy. Almost all of them on chalkboards. As have millions around the world. It’s not Discovery Channel, it’s not a slick, packaged deal handed to you on a plate – it’s not supposed to be. It’s something else.
The ideas in this kind of lecture are electrifying. They need context, of course, and that would be given in the course of study that these lectures were a part of. The ideas themselves, and their implications, are right there for anyone who’s fascinated enough to make the effort to get to grips with them.
I realize that I’m being harsh about a lecturer who is no worse than many lecturers in academia; but having done a considerable amount of lecturing myself, I know how easy it is to overcome the simple mistakes this lecturer makes, and I have contempt for those who presume to teach without ever putting any serious effort into the task.
I agree with the observations that many lecturers are atrocious, but that does not excuse those who are merely lazy. Yes, it takes some effort to prepare a decent lecture, but if you’re too lazy to do the job properly, just tell them to read the book and leave it at that. It’s better not to even try to teach than to do an incompetent job of it.
Perhaps I should give the fellow more time before being so harsh on him. Perhaps he was just getting warmed up and those first three minutes are not at all representative of his competence. If anybody who sat through the whole thing thinks that the first three minutes are not representative of the man’s talents, please advise and I’ll sit through more of it.
I also wish to strongly take issue with one aspect of what Daniel Jackson Andrews says about the student’s responsibility to learn. I agree with the general sentiment, but I also insist that anybody who attempts to communicate with another assumes a responsibility to express themselves clearly. A professor who merely says, “read the book” takes no responsibility for the student’s education, but once that professor opens their mouth and starts talking, they assume a responsibility to express themselves usefully. If a student fails to understand something I say, I initially assume the fault to be mine, and I make several more attempts to get the point across. If numerous attempts on my part fail, then I shrug my shoulders and conclude that it’s beyond my powers — but I don’t blame the student.
Lastly, an expansion of a previous point I made: if a lecturer spends one hour preparing and one hour delivering a lecture to 100 students, then that lecturer must believe that their own time is worth 50 times as much as the time of one student. I find such aristocratic attitudes despicable.
I think it depends why you’d want to watch.
I’d recommend giving the fellow more time if you want to learn the basics of quantum physics, because I’d imagine that’s the only group of people he’s concerned about communicating to.
You could hardly accuse him of being aristocratic or merely saying “read the book”. It’s as if you’re wanting to attack something else entirely – I don’t understand it.
In response to Alex Simmons, I’d like to offer these thoughts:
Good communication is not at all the same thing as entertainment, although entertainment can enhance communication. My lectures are always dense in content, and I therefore dedicate considerable effort to making my content as clear as I possibly can. For example, I have learned a clear differentiation between imagery and language. Language is fundamentally oral; I never put words on a slide because the written word doesn’t have the communicative power of the spoken word. Instead, I put imagery on slides and language in my mouth.
Some years ago I gave a lecture in Mumbai that was particularly heavy. It concerned the parallels between the phylogeny of play and learning, and one of its conclusions was that human cognitive ontogeny recapitulates the phylogeny of play. Is that heavy enough for you? The whole thing was done with rapid speech and an avalanche of imagery. At one point, I threw a ball across the stage so that it smashed hard into the wall — but I was illustrating a crucial point about human cognitive evolution.
The audience consisted of a disparate group of academics — but they all got it. The conversations afterwards demonstrated to me that they had gotten the central points of the lecture clearly. I expended a lot of time preparing that lecture, but I made a complicated point clear to a lot of people. If you put the time into it, you can accomplish a great deal. And if you *don’t* put any time into it, you produce crap. That should be obvious, shouldn’t it? 😉
Yes, I agree.
And I’m sure you’re very good.
But this guy is teaching quantum physics to students who want to learn quantum physics.
If there are people watching him to check out his ‘talents’ according to their own particular views on how they think communication should work, then chances are they’re not going to get much out of it.
It seems hardly likely that he’d have that kind of an audience in mind.
People who want to learn this kind of stuff learn it extremely well this way. If that’s not you, then why should you appreciate it? And just because you have your own views about how you think things should be done and you don’t appreciate how he’s doing it, why conclude after three minutes that it’s so disgusting that you have to tell everyone? I don’t understand that.