Carpe Datum

At nursing school at Columbia, the lecture notes are all power point presentations, available for download before class. And still the children complain that the professor is "going too fast."

The AV system didn't work one day, and they almost cancelled the lecture. I actually raised my hand and suggested using the chalkboard--the professor's notes were still perfectly visible on her laptop, and everyone had their copies anyway. She looked at me like I was from another planet, even though she is older than I am and must remember such antiquities.

We have multiple choice exams graded by computer, because there are "too many students." You would think that for $15,000 for just the summer term, they could afford some TAs to grade exams.

And the next time one of them asks "Are we responsible for this?" I'm going to throw a shoe.

From what I gather from Doug, Good TA's are hard to find regardless of pay.

(Feff puts on his sulfurous old Professor Hat and trident.)

I never used PowerPoint. It clearly is suitable only for microcephalic pointy-haired business types, and is geared for style rather than information transfer. (PowerPoint) (intersect) (good lecture practice) = (Empty set).

Most importantly IMHO, it discourages everyone from asking questions and getting more details. Unless you have hardcopies in hand so that you can make clear notation where in the presentation the important side explanation occurred, you'll lose those comments. (I say this from the last class I took, the summer I left academia, whose lecturer did the PowerPoint thing.) PowerPoint printouts == significant new offensive in the War On Trees.

I think a big danger with PowerPoint, too, is that it takes so much effort, there's a giant disincentive to simply not update your lectures from year to year. At least, not in any significant way. I find that making my notes informally, in outline form, and doing a few hours/week of surfing science websites during the term, really makes everything fresh for me and the students. And it gives me things to assign as mini-research projects for them.

Memo to self: Introducing Maxwell's equations (which isn't supposed to be needed, because it was supposed to be done in the *previous* quarter) to students in the 3rd quarter of the physics-with-calculus series so you can talk about electromagnetic waves (which *is* supposed to be part of the course at hand), with only ten minutes left in the class, on a Friday before a three-day weekend, is a Bad Idea.

Sigh.