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Comment by dghf | Hacker News Reader

> Finally, I realized not even students were too invested. When my best friend visited my campus to give a talk, he observed one of my lectures. I've got many shortcomings as an academic, but lecturing isn't one of them. I've been on TV, radio, podcasts — you name it. By professor standards, which admittedly aren't that high, I could rock the mic. But while my friend sat there, semi-engrossed in the lecture, he found himself increasingly distracted by the student in front of him. That student, who like all in-state students was paying $50 per lecture to hear me talk, was watching season one of Breaking Bad.

Well, a lack of investment by students is a plausible interpretation. Another is that the OP isn't as good at lecturing as he likes to think.

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"If he's pleasing them, he must be doing something wrong!"

Quick way of pleasing students is not getting on them when they are viewing Breaking Bad in the middle of a lecture.

If your standard for excellence in lecturing is "good enough to consistently wrest people's attention away from a glowing box loaded with all their favorite entertainments held inches from their face," you're going to have a hard time finding anyone who's excellent.

But why did the student even bother showing up?

Attendance requirements likely.

The author did mention that his class did not have an attendance requirement ("In a class with no attendance grade...").

Because you can get stuff from lectures without paying full attention. I download those Open Yale Courses lectures, and listen to them while driving to work. Driving, obviously, takes up some fraction of my brain, but I find that I still have plenty left over for listening.

Would I get more out of it if I listened while sitting at a desk and taking notes? Probably. But I'm getting a lot more than nothing out of it.

And obviously TV-watching is harder to combine with lecturing (among other things, the student presumably had to have closed-captioning on), but fundamentally the idea of doing two things at once when neither of them demands your complete attention isn't that weird.

Based on my personal experience, I wouldn't second-guess how people choose to get the most out of classes.

I find that really paying attention to something over an extended amount of time is hard work. Very few lecture subjects and presenters are genuinely interesting enough for it and paced well enough for it, and it also requires a certain amount of energy, which I may not always have, or have for long enough for the whole thing. So I often try to find a way to have something mildly to moderately distracting while in these lectures, like a newspaper or magazine or something. I often find computers and TV shows to be too distracting, such that I may not really hear anything, but the mild distractors help keep me focused enough to hear the important parts without my attention drifting away entirely.

But I also haven't been to any lectures in a long time, because I think that they're a terrible way of conveying information, mostly because they force a lot of people to all share the same pace. If something was paced just right for me, then it's probably too fast and hard to follow for some people, and too slow, boring, and tough to stay focused on for others.

Of course, it's also possible that the student just doesn't care at all, and is only there to get the piece of paper, which he has been told will automatically lead to a good job.

Prof learns your face, might not throw you out when you show up with your hat in your hand.

In my experience, it is always worth showing up, but not always worth paying attention as far as a cost-gain analysis from a student perspective. Showing up ensures that if there is an announcement or hints about labs/homework then you can take advantage of it. Lecture material is often availible elsewhere such as class website or the textbook

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