I agree with pretty much everything you said in your blog. I really like that you pointed out how learning is a two-way street. Yes, professors need to try to be engaging and they should try to teach in a way that students can connect and understand, but students need to be willing to learn and want to be there in order for a course to be truly effective. Throughout my college career I’ve had some courses where I was just not interested (mostly general education courses) and I did not put in the effort that I should have. Perhaps, if the professors’ lectures were more engaging, I would have put more effort into my learning. I think that when you go into a class with the mindset of, “I just want to get this over with so I can move on” you’re not going to get much out of the class, no matter how good the professor is. I have also had courses where I didn’t particularly like my professors’ teaching style. There was one higher level engineering course where the professor spent the whole time writing on the board and I spent the whole time writing as fast as I could so I didn’t miss anything (this wasn’t a huge class probably fewer than 30 students). While I found this class extremely difficult to keep up with, I put in the extra effort to go to office hours and spend time working through problems with my professor because it was a topic that interested me. I found that my professor was much better at explaining things one-on-one than he was during class and I felt that I really got a lot out of the course because I took the initiative to get the help that I needed.

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I took this class as an undergrad as well and I have to say as an engineer this was the only non math/science course that I truly enjoyed. Not only did he come up with a great outline for the course that really allowed students to take control of the way they learned but he also was just so enthusiastic about what he was talking about it made me want to learn more!

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I definitely agree about courses taught by professors who have experience in the field. I think it is very important to understand how what we are learning in classes can actually be applied to real world situations, this is why it is great when your professor can give you examples from work that they have actually been involved in. For me it helps motivate me, knowing how useful concepts I am learning will be in the future.

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