Unit 4     

   "What's wrong with the students of today? Back when I was a student we had a better attitude!" Criticisms like this are often heard from parents and teachers, in the newspapers and other media ?and it's been that way ever since education began. No matter what society or era you consider, there are always plenty of wise authorities pointing out that "The students of today" are somehow failing to grasp the true meaning of university education. Or maybe it's the other way around: Are universities failing to grasp the true meaning of students? The texts in this unit examine different aspects of this question. Text A discusses the many pressures that modern students face, while Texts B and C take a harder look at some basic misunderstandings about education and what a university is for.

Directions: As you read Text B, try to predict the general direction of the author's thinking. There are a few questions inserted in the text to guide you -- be sure to answer them before you go on to the next section of the text. And remember: Being 100% accurate in your predictions isn't as important as the process of making predictions based on alert and active reading.

Text B    

College Lectures: Is Anybody Listening?

    A former teacher of mine, Robert A. Fowkes of New York University, likes to tell the story of a class he took in Old English while studying in Germany during the 1930s. On the first day the professor strode up to the blackboard, looked through his notes, coughed, and began, "Guten Tag, Meine Damen und Herren"("Good day, ladies and gentlemen"). Fowkes glanced around uneasily. He was the only student in the course.

   Toward the middle of the semester, Fowkes fell ill and missed a class. When he returned, to Fowkes's astonishment, the professor began to deliver not the next lecture in the sequence but the one after. Had he, in fact, lectured to an empty hall in the absence of his solitary student? Fowkes thought it perfectly possible.

   One aspect of American education too seldom challenged is the lecture system. Professors continue to lecture and students to take notes much as they did in the thirteenth century, when books were so scarce and expensive that few students could own them. The time is long overdue for us to abandon the lecture system and turn to methods that really work.

  One problem with lectures is that listening intelligently is hard work. Reading the same material in a textbook is a more efficient way to learn because students can proceed as slowly as they need to until the subject matter becomes clear to them. Even simply paying attention is very difficult: people can listen at a rate of four hundred to six hundred words a minute, while the most spirited professor talks at scarcely a third of that speed. This time lag between speech and comprehension leads to daydreaming. Many students believe years of watching television have shortened their attention span, but their real problem is that listening attentively is much harder than they think.

   Worse still, attending lectures is passive learning, at least for inexperienced listeners. Active learning, in which students write essays or perform experiments and then have their work evaluated by an instructor, is far more beneficial for those who have not yet fully learned how to learn. While it's true that techniques of active listening, such as trying to anticipate the speaker's next point or taking intelligent notes, can enhance the value of a lecture, few students possess such skills at the beginning of their college careers. More commonly, students try to write everything down and even bring tape recorders to class in a clumsy effort to capture every word.

    Students need to question their professors and to have their ideas taken seriously. Only then will they develop the analytical skills required to think intelligently and creatively. Most students learn best by engaging in frequent and even heated debate, not by taking down a professor's often unsatisfactory summary of complicated issues. They need small discussion classes that demand a joint effort of teacher and students rather than classes in which one person, however learned, expresses his or her own ideas.

    The lecture system ultimately harms professors as well. It reduces feedback to a minimum, so that the lecturer can neither judge how well students understand the material nor benefit from their questions or comments. Questions that require the speaker to clarify obscure points and comments that challenge inadequately constructed arguments are indispensable to scholarship. Without them, the liveliest mind becomes dull. Undergraduates may not be able to make good contributions very often, but by lecturing alone a professor fails to attract the beginner's naive question that could have triggered a fruitful line of thought.

    If lectures make so little sense, why have they been allowed to continue? Administrators love them of course. They can cram far more students into a lecture hall than into a discussion class, and for many administrators that's almost the end of the story. But the truth is that faculty members, and even students, conspire with them to keep the lecture system alive and well. Lectures are easier on everyone than debates. Professors can pretend to teach by lecturing just as students can pretend to learn by attending lectures, with no one the wiser, including the participants. Moreover, if lectures give some students an opportunity to sit back and let the professor run the show, they offer some professors an irresistible forum for showing off. In a classroom where everyone contributes, students are less able to hide and professors have less room to show off how smart they are.

   Lectures will never entirely disappear from the university scene, both because they seem to be economically necessary and because they spring from a long tradition in a setting that rightly values tradition for its own sake. But the lectures too frequently come at the wrong end of the students' educational careers -- during the first two years, when they most need close, even individual, instruction. If lecture classes were restricted to junior and senior undergraduates and to graduate students, who are more academically independent and more capable of working on their own, they would be far less destructive of students' interests and enthusiasms than the present system. After all, students must learn to listen before they can listen to learn.

大学讲课：有人在听吗？

 戴维·丹尼尔斯

   我以前的一位老师，纽约大学的罗伯特·A·福克斯，喜欢讲述1930年代他在德国学习时上的一门古英语课程的故事。第一天，教授大步走向黑板，翻了翻笔记，清了清嗓门，然后开始上课，“Guten Tag, Meine Damen und Herren”（“白天好，女士们先生们”） 福克斯不安地看了看四周。他是这门课程唯一的学生。

   临近期中，福克斯生病，缺了一次课。当他回来时，他惊奇地发现教授没有按顺序开始讲授下一课，而是讲再下面一课。难道在他唯一的学生缺席时他真的面对着空荡荡的大课堂讲过课了吗？福克斯认为这完全可能。

   如今，美国的学院和大学（最初就是仿效德国大学的）正遭到严厉的抨击。人们指责老师们教得不好，学生们学得不好。美国的工商企业因管理人员缺乏创造性而受到损害，那些管理人员接受的教育不是去独立进行思考，而是去重复早已被世界上其它国家早就所抛弃的过时思想。大学毕业生们既缺乏基本技能也缺少一般的文化修养。关于高等教育的地位人们在进行研究，在发表报告，但由此而引起的变化要么主要是装装门面的，要么是使糟糕的事态变得更糟。

   美国教育中一个很少受到质疑的方面就是讲课制度。就同十三世纪的时候一样教授们继续在讲课，学生们继续在记笔记，那时候书籍十分稀少昂贵，学生很少。我们早就该放弃讲课制度，转而采用向真正奏效的方法了。

   讲课的一大问题在于开动脑筋听课决非易事。在教科书上阅读同样的材料是一种更为有效的学习方法，因为学生们可以根据需要慢慢阅读，直到他们明白主要内容为止。就是集中心思也很困难：人们能够以每分钟400到600个词的速度倾听，而精神最饱满的教授讲话的速度也难以达到这个速度的三分之一。讲与理解之间的这一时间差会使人分心想别的事。许多学生认为长年累月看电视已经缩短了他们注意力持续集中的时间，但他们真正的问题在于专心听讲比他们想象的要困难得多。

   更糟糕的是，听课是消极学习，至少对于没有经验的听课者来说是这样。积极学习，即学生们写文章或做实验，然后让一位老师评估他们的作业，对那些还没有完全学会如何学习的学生来说要更为有益得多。虽然积极听课的技巧，如设法预期讲课人的下一点内容或者动脑筋记笔记，的确可以提高讲课的价值，但是几乎没有学生在大学学习之初就具备这样的技巧。更通常的情况是，学生们试图把一切都记下来，甚至把录音机带到课堂上来，笨拙地试图录下每一个字。

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