It was my senior year of college and most of my classes were Anthropology related. I got lucky that my college turned Anthropology into a new major that year. I had almost enough classes from the Sociology department that overlapped into the new major that I could graduate with a double major. I only had to get through a few Anthropological Theory classes and had to take a few Spanish classes to achieve this goal.
Anthropological Theory sounded interesting but ended up being the worst class I've ever taken. On the first day of class my professor announced that after the second week of classes, he would no longer be lecturing. Instead, each class session two students would give presentations on a chapter of our textbook. One person would give a 40 minute presentation and the second would give a 10 minute recap to cover anything the first person missed.
Basically, our professor expected inexperienced undergraduates to teach their peers. He lectured on the first few days of class and then never lectured again. The thing about undergraduate students is most have never had to give more than a five minute presentation in classes...especially undergraduate Sociology students. Because of their lack of experience, undergrad students are horrible teachers. This one class was an absolute disaster from the start.
When it was time for the presentations to begin, the first presenter lasted 5 minutes. Getting up in front of a class to give a 40 minute presentation is hard when you've never done so before. The poor guy was nervous and ran through his material fast. The second person who was doing the recap portion also ran through their material. Those of us in the audience were expected to take notes because we were going to be tested over the theories we learned....we didn't learn anything that day.
Groups of students in the class went to the department head to complain about how horrible it was and how unfair it was. Our professor got mad about the complaints and basically yelled as us for not making it to 40 minutes with the presentations. Before and after class you could hear students talking about how much they hated the class.
So did anyone make it 40 minutes?
The day our professor yelled at us, he had made it clear he was ready to start failing people. By scaring the hell out of those of us who hadn't presented he had lit a fire. I was one of the first students to make it slightly over 40 minutes long.
To prepare I did the only thing I knew how to do...I wrote a paper. I wrote a 10 page paper over the topic I was presenting on. What was my topic? I have absolutely no memory. I wrote the paper, read my paper super slowly to get me to the 40 minute mark, and immediately forgot everything. I had never given a presentation like that before. I was so freaked out the days leading up to the presentation that my social anxiety kicked into high gear and my only thoughts were getting through it without embarrassing myself.
After my presentation the others who needed to present asked me how I figured out how to make it to 40 minutes and I told them a 10 page paper read a little at a time will get them there. Everyone copied my tactic and others started making it 40 minutes. Every person read from a piece of paper. There was no eye contact with the audience. It was just a bunch of people doing what they needed to do to get through a class with no care that the audience learned anything.
It was horrible. The second test for the semester was as horrible as the first. No one knew what to study. No one knew what to take notes on. There were lots of low grades and the professor was forced to offer extra credit to get the grades where they needed to be.
So many students complained that semester that the professor refused to ever teach the class again. When I became a graduate student in the Sociology department the next year some of the other grad students said the class was such a disaster our professor went through a bad depression because students hated it so much.
Moral To The Story:
I didn't learn a thing that semester. I wasted good money paying for a class that was useless. I paid for students to teach me and our professor to sit in the back of class and watch us. It was a lazy way of teaching and he ruined what could have been a great class by refusing to teach us himself.
Whats the worst class you've ever taken?
Sorry you had to take such a terrible course. Definitely sounds like the professor was just trying to push his work onto the students. At least you got a good story out of it.
The teacher was probably just trying something new........but it's also possible that he was just really lazy and made a mistake. It's sad to hear that it affected him so negatively but he should have been smarter than to attempt something like that.
The professor had been there a long time. I know what he was doing now that I'm older and have worked for departments. When professors are super busy (writing books or big research projects) they run classes where there are tons of student presentations or group projects. That way students basically do all the work and professors have time to do their other projects.
Interesting story and it sounds like you at least got a good life lesson out of it. I wish I could decide to just skip doing my job for the better part of semester and just sit there and kick back while my co-workers pick up he slack ;-)
When you are a tenured professor you can get away with being lazy at times. Unfortunately I have a few similar stories about other lazy professors.
The thing is the guy just wanted you all to do all of his work while he just sat back and never had to prepare.
Most likely that was the case. Shame he wasted our time.
Wow that was f....... horrible! Hmm that teacher was acting as an a.....
Sorry you we went trough that.
P/s: so do you speak Spanish?
I took 3 years Spanish in jr high, 2 years in high school, and 2 semesters in college....still can't speak Spanish. lol. I know words. I know basic sentence structures. I know enough to decipher what people are saying but I could never have a conversation in Spanish.
Lol! It all good , at least you can understand! That is good! :) I’m from Argentina Spanish is my native language.
extraordinary you can pass with the Department of double. may I know what degree you have?
I wanna know degree of abroad university 🙏
Buena historia. Todo deja un aprendizaje
Como profesora universitaria te comento que la estrategia no es mala, el problema fue cómo la implemento el docente. Te pregunto ¡el profesor se ofrecio a darles asesorias antes de las exposiciones? si es afirmativa la respuesta, quienes pecaron fueron ustedes por no aprovechar la asesoria; en caso negativo, el que fallo fue el profesor pues estaba en su deber de asesorarlos y ustedes en su derecho de recibirlo.
esta estrategia yo la he aplicado y bajo estas condiciones resulta. En caso que en la exposición el alumno este deficiente, el profesor debe complementar la actividad y terminar de aclarar las cosas que quedaron incompletas para que los alumnos no queden flojos.
That really sucks. My students hate doing presentation, only high school, so I don't make them do it often. It's really lazy teaching to have students teach other so much, I agree a little is good on many levels.
WOW what's a story my dear, I am glad that you took good lesson for your future. I had almost the same experience. Past is past, thank you for sharing ;)))
Wow... Glad I wasn't in that class! Did he end up failing anyone? I can see incorporating a student lesson into your semester, but that is nuts!
Presentations, especially, are hard for undergraduates. It's not only the experience, but you're presenting in front of your peers. Unless they're non-traditional, undergraduate students are still pretty young and still worried about how they're being perceived by their peers.
The worst class I ever had involved a teacher who would get angry every class, because students weren't listening. This turned more students off, and he would get angrier. He'd usually be sweating, sputtering, and red-faced by the end of class and yelling that people need to pay attention.
But I'm glad that everything worked out.
greetings and good post ,,,, as always giving my support I wait for you in my blog to receive yours, thanks
Really bad form, testing students on things they may or may have not been taught (particularly in an undergrad class). Lessons often give something off about how/what the teacher thinks important which leads to how the testing will go.
The worst class I ever took was a required freshman English. The person teaching it was not a native speaker and although she knew the parts of sentence she was totally clueless on the culture. Women got marked down if papers weren't focused on traditionally female interests (eg. cooking, sewing) and the same for men (sports, home repair). I remember one class in particular when she wanted one of the guys to describe the track suit that he had seen his teacher wearing in a class he had earlier in the day. It took several minutes to explain that the other teacher didn't wear a tie with it.