Comment by philip1209 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by philip1209 | Hacker News Reader

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One of my favorite classes in college was a physics course taught in this way:

1. Before class, we were assigned to read a chapter from the textbook, understand the material, and complete two or three homework problems from the material we had just self-learned.

2. After submitting homework, lectures focused on discussing the concepts more in-depth. Everybody already had a baseline knowledge, so the professor would highlight the important takeaways, applications, live demonstrations of concepts, etc. I found these lectures engaging because I had already learned the material - and the lectures focused on mastering it.

3. Sometimes there would be follow-up homework problems focusing on advanced applications or derivations. These advanced problems were closest to exam questions.

Some takeaways for me:

- If we didn't have homework to do before class, I doubt I would have consistently learned the material before lecture.

- Lectures taught us more than the "what" - it taught us the "why" and how these concepts related to other areas.

- Lectures focused on answering questions, exploring curiosities (like "what if" questions), demonstrations/experiments, and mastery. The professor added value beyond the written material!

I hope this helps OP because it sounds like they have material prepared beforehand, which means that the lectures could go beyond the material.

This sounds fantastic .... but in my experience many students do not read the material as assigned. How did the lecturer manage to overcome that?

> Before class, we were assigned to read a chapter from the textbook, understand the material, and complete two or three homework problems from the material we had just self-learned. [Emphasis mine.]

Grade the students on this?

My favorite course ever had the same structure. It was an elective, with only about 15 3d and 4th year students. Those not up for the reading dropped out. We covered about 20 high quality economic papers in 6 months, quite impressive for a teacher to accomplish that with students. I can pretty much still remember the contents of the course.

There was homework due before class from the material!

I had classes with the same structure. The homework was one of those online setups, and our professor had a policy that we should be ready with questions. If the questions stopped during class, the homework grade would be replaced by the grade on a quiz. The quizzes were fair game every day,were limited in scope,and only happened if the professor decided there was too little engagement.

This method sounds appealing and reasonable. My question would be- did you have a good sense of how many of your peers did in fact do the homework ahead of class- my instinctual fear is that due to this ‘different approach’ many students may not be bothered to do this?

> My question would be- did you have a good sense of how many of your peers did in fact do the homework ahead of class- my instinctual fear is that due to this ‘different approach’ many students may not be bothered to do this?

I took part in an online course where you had to answer 3/5 quick questions correctly before you were admitted to the lecture room.

I think it resulted in an engaged and knowledgeable class.

I've also taken a course where you can't proceed to the next lecture unless you get more than 70% grade on homework from the previous lecture (which you could submit multiple times but it was not multiple choice). This also worked really well.

Homework was required and graded, so I assume everybody did it! It also forced you to attend every lecture because you had to hand in homework on the way in. The professor claimed he would throw away homework from those who dropped it off and walked out. (In reality, with prior communication he was always flexible. )

I like this model, but it puts a huge workload on the TA to help with questions about the homework, since the students don't get to hear the professor explain the material until after.

if a student can't learn from a book, the have to first learn to learn from a book.

I took a physics class taught like that last year, and my experience was the opposite. Because the teaching team expected that students had read and understood the material before class (hint: very few people read it, even fewer understood it), the TAs and professors went waaay faster than they should have, and the class was one of the most stressful experiences I've had at college. Nobody liked it.

I had mixed results like that years ago, it was 'repaired' later on by repeating the stuff you should already know, mostly as a verification, but the people that might not have read what they were supposed to read would have a chance to catch up.

Ultimately, it is of course the responsibility of the student to decide what they want to do. If you don't want to learn, see learning as a side-job, or live in an environment that does not leave room for learning outside of college hours, then you might be in more generic trouble anyway ;-)

Hey, mathattack and philip1209, those are really useful points of view, thank you.

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