Why Students Can Learn More From Bad Professors

Ann Yezerski

King's College, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania
annyezerski@kings.edu

We’re good and we know it. We can teach (nod assuredly and pat yourself on the back). We care about our students. They send us post-graduation Christmas cards, wedding invitations, birth announcements and tuition bills (wait a minute….). We attend conferences and workshops to further improve our skills and knowledge.

We are proud to have moved beyond the “good ole days” when the professors was an inaccessible, God-like figure hovering in the front of the room in a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows, reading the text word-for-word for what seemed hours on end. Pertinent information came down to us in the form of sheets mimeographed so many times it looked more like Morse code than English. Textbooks had entire pages without pictures and, back then, they were in (*gasp*) black and white! Laboratory exercises were painstakingly written out step by step, including the expected outcome. Sometimes the instructor even left the room, leaving us floundering with a two -dimensional picture and a three-dimensional cat. How did we manage to learn anything?

Then we became the professors and decided, enough was enough. We were actually going to teach…and demonstrate…and even entertain! We now present in PowerPoint with video clips, we give puppet shows of how T cells work, we make up Krebs cycle songs and perform photosynthesis dances. So, how could I blasphemously make the statement in my title?

Sometimes we try too hard and mistakenly take away the most important aspect of learning – the ability to figure it out for yourself. We were forced to do that in "our day," when the first exam rolled around and we realized that we hadn’t actually acquired the information by osmosis while asleep in the classroom. The handouts were unreadable – the book made no sense. How were we going to become prepared in time? Procrastination is the mother of cramming. We had to make sense of the topics and organize in such a way as to remember it for at least 24 hours. We agonized with each other to help decipher the more complex topics. We made diagrams and charts to summarize involved concepts. In essence, we had to teach ourselves because we hadn’t learned it from the professor. In a way, doing this can result in learning more.

With our new-fangled ideas, we have sometimes taken away the opportunity to use self-teaching as a learning tool. We hand the students pre-made diagrams and summary charts (in a rainbow of colors). We make efforts to actually explain concepts during the lecture and use a myriad of entertaining means to make a lasting impression. So, should we go back to being opaque and obstructive? Just try it. The resulting cacophony of whining would make anybody jump back like they just touched a hot stove. In fact, as an experiment, try telling them that "back when I was young," we used to have finals that were cumulative for the year. Sit back and listen for the thump as students' bodies hit the floor.

Our new ideas are conducive to learning, and there are definite benefits to our evolved teaching methods. The important thing to remember is we must still allow the opportunity for using self-teaching as a tool (but secretly -- so they don’t know they're doing it). How? Here are a few suggestions and examples, but I’m sure others have more:

• Have them write their own test questions. Being able to create a question takes a higher level of knowledge than just answering one. The last class of the semester, the students work in pairs to create test questions with the promise that I will use some of them on the final.
• Make their own pictures. Have them create their own diagrams on a concept. For example, students have to make a poster caricature of the cell as a factory.
• Problem-based learning. Solving a problem goes beyond memorizing already organized information. Someday I’ll elaborate on how I use venomous organisms to teach physiology (or, rather, have the students learn it).
• Structureless labs. Give them the tools and knowledge on how to use them, but let them figure out how to reach the goal. For example, after a semester of learning how to use a computer physiograph, the students have to build and operate a polygraph by themselves.

So, it is not that we are doing the students a disservice by trying to find more effective ways for them to learn complex biological concepts. We just have to make sure that in trying to be the best teacher, we don’t create a worse student. Learning how to learn is the first skill that we should teach, because that ability will serve anyone for the rest of his or her life, no matter what the topic.