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Comment by alistairSH | Hacker News Reader

I’d post that straight lecture is a crap way to teach/learn. And the large auditorium classes that are common at most state Us are fundamentally broken. Interactive discussion is probably much better for most students.

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Pretty much everyone but the actual students agree that would be better. We can't do that since the students typically refuse to do the necessary prep.

I'm reminded of Amazon's meeting rule where the first 15 minutes are devoted to reading any documents because it's assumed no one did it ahead of the meeting. This is a problem in the workplace as well.

That's not entirely true at Amazon. It's expected for many of the more involved people in the meeting to read ahead of time, and at least be familiar with the subject.

At the same time, the time is given because not everyone will have time to read ahead of time. That 15 minutes at the start is their calendar block; think of managers who have back to back meetings all day.

It's not some referendum on people being careless.

The one course where I showed up to every class was a discussion class. It was on AI and each lecture was a 10 minute topic intro, 30 min of group discussion and research, and 10 min of presentations.

The courses I never attended a single class for were reading screenshots of a textbook.

Idk my fellow student didn’t have any more insight than I did. Without work experience it’s all theoretical

Theory is kind of the point thought. College isn’t/shouldn’t be just a job training program. That’s part of the problem.

Without experience you can’t ground theory into reality and you miss the critical details that actually make things work. For me interesting stuff happens in the implementation later between theory and dirty reality.

Study groups were my replacement for this, but that requires a critical mass to get going.

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