“[W]hen you start reading your slides,” a University of South Dakota student writes to his professors in the school’s newspaper, “I’m picking my FarmVille crops.”
The student’s mainly complaining about mandatory attendance policies. He reasonably enough points out the absurdity of insisting that students attend morgue-like events — especially when everything coming from the crypt is already downloadable.
I don’t know which is more offensive: Being forced to listen to a person with a PhD read PowerPoint slides for an hour when I could have done it in 20 minutes at home or the fact that if I don’t go then I will be dropped from the course and thus robbed of a few hundred dollars.
How does a person with a PhD think reading PowerPoint slides is an effective teaching method? At least have the decency to not drop me if I don’t show up.
PowerPoint: I had not thought death had undone so many.
October 9th, 2010 at 9:19AM
Note that the student also said that he himself had learned to use P/P properly while in high school.
I’m not a PowerPoint lover: its structure encourages bad presentations…but doesn’t force them. It’s possible to use it to give great presentations. The deeper problems here are (1)professors who don’t care enough about their teaching responsibilities to learn to give a good lecture, and (2)classes that are way too large for any kind of interaction.