There have been a few times I’ve dropped a course because I’ve been entirely demotivated by the teacher. Sometimes, it is as simple as the teacher saying just one thing wrong: one time a instructor proudly stated “compilers is a solved problem”, and as most of my interests in parsing were still open research questions, I decided immediately that there would be nothing I could learn from that class. However, sometimes the situation is much more involved.
With one class I took, the professor had decided that, due to a recent policy change (where graduate students had to take classes instead of just pass screening exams, something I had already found highly demotivating as the change was unadvertised and happened the year I started), he needed to hold students more accountable for work; but a the class did not have much related to “homework” (it was mostly about reading papers) he came up with horrible strategy.
What he did was he brought a stack of notecards with the names of every student, which he would shuffle at the beginning of class. He would then read off the person’s name and ask them a question about the paper we were reading, at which point the student would answer the question and he would write some notes on the card. After explaining how this worked, he started the process on the first day of class. Here’s what I remember of how this went down (names totally made up and random):
“Jack, would you please summarize the first paper for us?” Jack, after stuttering a little from being put on the spot, then provided a summary; the professor then mumbled “Interesting, OK…” while scribbling notes on his card. Moving to the next card, “Jill, was that a summary?” Somewhat in shock, Jill forces out a “uhh… no?”, at which point the professor continues “Jill, what is a summary.” Jill comes up with an answer to this question (just barely). “OK, now Bob: would you now try summarizing the first paper?”
FWIW, I actually didn’t have an issue with this. One time after being asked “Jay: can you define
The problem was that this essentially shut down the class. I do not feel there is much value in just listening to a teacher say things during the course of a class: I can read a five page document with the content in much less time than I can sit around waiting for an hour while I listen to audio that I need to avoid zoning out during lest I miss content. (A friend of mine has a great demotivation story involving a TA whose job it was to read aloud notes from the professor… total waste of time.)
Most courses, though, especially at the graduate level, have some form of interactive discussion component: it might not be explicitly designed, but students can ask each other questions and conversations can happen. Most of the actual learning in a class happens during these side discussions. With this class, this was not possible: the entire class was essentially paralyzed, and the few of us who were not didn’t want to ask any questions anymore because we were just making our classmate’s lives harder.
The process of the class (the questions given to specific people in a rotational order determined by the cards) itself didn’t even then provide as much value as a lecture (which I already argued is not valuable): if you read the papers you didn’t learn much, if anything, from hearing people answer questions about the papers; the only time this was enlightening was if someone made a mistake you would have made answering the same question. You also couldn’t try to participate, as the order was fixed by the cards.
So, essentially, I was trapped there just waiting for my one turn to come up with the cards so I could provide a ten second long answer, and once that was over probably just wait for the class to end so I could leave. I started bringing a flute and sat there practicing fingering. After a couple more weeks of this I decided “this is not just a waste of my time, this is a waste of everyone here’s time, as the people who are stressed out are not learning anything either”, and decided to drop the class.
I went to the professor and explained to him that I was dropping the class and exactly why. He said that many students didn’t understand the importance of precision, and that even at the graduate level this was an important lesson to learn. He did not seem to care that it effectively destroyed the class, and seemed proud in his discovered technique. Over five years later (just a couple years ago) I heard that he finally broke down a student to tears in a class: that finally convinced him to stop using the cards :/.