summary response-essay one draft

the importance of class design


In “Is Anybody Listening?” David Daniel mentions that American teachers and students of colleges and universities today are charged not doing well on their works. According to David’s aspect to college education, he argues that lectures are not suitable for freshmen and sophomores for the reason that they are not well-trained in grasping idea and taking notes of a long lecturing. Mr. Daniel suggests that lectures should be taken action to juniors, seniors, or graduate students, then all of whom group a discussion after the classes, which would be more effective for learning. On the other hand, as for freshmen and sophomores, administrators and faculty might design a series smaller class for them to end their passivity and to give their feedbacks to instructors. However, nowadays most of universities don’t have the effective design of classes for students; even in my school there is still some space to be improving for student’s independent learning.

I have taken a course called “General Knowledge Lectures” which contains around two thousands student taking this class. The regulations of this class are that taking a page note that you just need to write down from the speaker’s power point file and to attend the class ten times. Then, you will definitely get the credit. During the class, I often saw some of students falling sleep and doing their own things when they finished their notes. After the speech, the instructor asked everyone had any question; nevertheless, we had packed our stuff looking bored and wanting the class over soon. The worst of this class is that they take the notes away. So even you want to review what you have written down from the class, you have no reference. I truly have no understanding why we have to spend a semester sitting there and learn seldom.

General knowledge originally means that you can get some general knowledge from other field which you are not familiar with and can broaden your knowledge. However, I think that such a huge space will be easy to distract your attention and is hard to concentrate on professor’s presentation. Therefore, why the administrators deem these courses as required subjects? There is no need for us to spend a long period to do an ineffective work. The original meaning of the general knowledge courses is beneficial for our learning, but they are practiced in this lecturing way that might reduce the effectiveness of learning of students especially for freshmen. This way of teaching might make freshmen student decrease their interests in developing another specialty. Besides, owing to the fact that there are even more students in one class, between the professor and the students is lack of interaction. Professor cannot understand how much his or her listeners absorb. In contrast, listeners don’t know where their problems are.

Moreover, if students don’t know how to take up their questions, it will be sure to affect their learning. A good learner is supposed to be a question asker. However, how to find where our questions are needs to be trained by asking question often. From the asking process, they will learn the core of the question, making more progress in a field. In the way of searching solution, they will also acquire the ability of giving comments and analyzing the questions. Nevertheless, I think that this progress needs to learn from the interaction between discussions or with teachers. After being a good question asker, next they will be more likely to have ability to think independently and find out the answer.

If the design of class is based on inspiring student’s interest and training independent thinking first, it will accelerate the learning effectiveness. Such being the case, students are able to know more about themselves on learning way, have imagination, give precise comments, have ability to take notes, and be a concentrate listener in the class. Therefore, a good design of class is absolutely beneficial to learning.