“There really wasn’t a lot this machine could do that you couldn’t do yourself in half the time with a lot less trouble,” said Richard, “but it was, on the other hand, very good at being a slow and dim-witted pupil.”

Reg looked at him quizzically.

“I had no idea they were in such short supply,” he said. “I could hit a dozen of them with a bread roll from where I’m sitting.”

“I’m sure. But look at it this way. What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?”

This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table.

Richard continued. “What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted the pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that’s really the essence of programming. By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve certainly learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn’t that true?”

“It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils,” came a low growl from somewhere on the table, “without undergoing a prefrontal lobotomy.”

[...]

“I forget, did you ever get any essays done at all?”

“Well, not as such. No actual essays, but the reasons why not were absolutely fascinating.”

Source: Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

But unfortunately, I know. He believes.

There are a number of other issues that have arisen, some few of which are detailed in a previous post. Note that none of them are outright falsehoods; I’m sure you could find somebody, maybe even outside academia, who agreed with any or even all of them.

Even if your professor was teaching non-misleading material, I personally think lecturing is just not the way to go for most subjects. Especially in the physical sciences. It doesn’t help me to have someone copy the book in chalk form or, worse still, try to make up a new book in chalk form. Maybe I’m just slow, but I can’t understand most derivations in the time required to write them down even (especially?) if the person doing it is trying to explain parts as they go. I would MUCH prefer to have professors that find a appropriate course texts and use class time to answer students questions. Then they could help students avoid common pitfalls instead of serving as low-tech error-prone transcribers.

In the absence of an acceptable text, decently thought out course notes distributed well before class could serve as a substitute. I think this type of teaching could be great, but requires a lot of confidence in the course material. Is that why no one does it?

The professor had tenure and I was also able to tell the dean, truthfully, that aside from problems with ACCURACY, the teacher was charismatic, engaging, and very available to students. So I didn’t torpedo the guy’s career.