| HN Mirror

Am I not supposed to expect a quality lecture from a university professor? I have had such a bad experience with certain lecturers, I'm certain what they were saying wasn't incorrect but the way they were speaking made it impossible to follow. It wasn't just me who thought so. I admit I've had learning difficulties my whole life but I believe it is actually impossible to learn all the material from the classes with all the details from books. You can pick a field or two which interest you the most and delve deep into the details. An extremely fundamental topic at my uni is called "introduction to circuit analysis". It was taught by a professor who was so bad at teaching it there was no point in coming to his lectures. You would learn more from watching youtube videos. Everyone was aware of the state of that class. Even our lab professors would mock his teaching style. Now if every class was like this we would be lost. I'll give a recent example of another lecturer who I also consider bad, but fortunately he is teaching an easy subject. First class a kid asks 'what's the difference between a router and a switch'. The professor answers 'a switch works on layer 2 and a router works on layer 3'. In my opinion this is a non answer. Yeah he said the truth but it didn't mean anything. If that student didn't know the difference between a switch and a router then surely he doesn't know about the ISO OSI model. Before you think he probably didn't have time to answer more specifically to make sure he understands. This guy notoriously keeps digressing from the subject. As that classes subject is one I am familiar with I knew the way he taught it was impossible to make sense of because he never answered in a concrete way, everything felt so drawn out and lacking a focal point, it's hard to describe. It took him four hours to go over the ISO OSI model and honestly while I wasn't paying attention to every single word he said. With all the digressions and constant comments about stuff you just couldn't follow his train of thought. On the contrary electromagnetism class was absolutely amazing. It's still a difficult subject, at least for me because I've always been pretty bad at physics but the lad who taught it was brilliant. He made sure we all understood, he started with very basic concepts that everyone knew, just to be certain everyone is on the same page. His presentations were concise, easy to follow with links to read up/watch stuff that you didn't fully get or wanted to learn more about. They had plenty of visualizations with gifs of stuff. It's a pleasure going to his classes. So I think that I should expect the lectures to give me an understanding of a subject. If I had to read a book for every class there wouldn't be enough time in a day for me to catch up.