The point of students learning styles has been brought up before, and I think it’s a very interesting and important thing to consider. There are students who learn most effectively by listening; then a lecture should be a very effective study tool and a breeze to get through. There are also students who learn only by doing. These students get more from being personally involved. Moreover, doing entails messing up; there is nothing that would teach better than making a mistake, which is what I think the idea behind the whole ‘learn by doing’ phenomena.
These dual ideas are hard to apply in teaching a classroom full of students. Being considerate of individual students learning methods is impossible, so the only true criterion for lecture vs. non lecture should be the class subject. Some classes, like the sciences, on which the entire study is based on basic facts, should be lectured on. They deal with abstract concepts that could only be explained by someone who understands them and can, thus, explain them in manner more easily digested by students who have never before been exposed to the topic.
I am wary of the idea of lecture for an English class, however. An English class is meant to develop the student’s critical thinking skills, which would mean that the students have to develop ideas about a poet’s message, which is often cryptic, and then choose the best, or one that everyone agrees on, from among those ideas. I would argue that this process may sometime be fruitless, especially in a fifty minute class. It is not fruitless in that we don’t think about a poem and develop ideas about it. I feel, however, that sometimes we leave class unresolved about a certain poem, or an interpretation of that poem. I think that a short lecture, such as the one we had last week, would be perfect to direct our discussions throughout the week. A lecture that introduces the ideas of the time period, such as the ideals of modernism, or about the author and his/her ideas and about their life would shine a new light on their writing. It would narrow our perspectives, and focus in on ideas that might be more relevant. All in all, I think it will direct our discussion into what is hopefully the right direction.
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I agree. I thought that the lecture last week did help me in many ways to understand the poems. Especially, The Wasteland. Miss Natalia's short lecture helped me see a new perspective of that poem that we had not been able to, well atleast i had not been able to see in the class disscussion. Plus, I actually do learn more when I hear it compared to reading it to myself. So that lecture was very useful, and we should have lectures more often.
I agree with you that sometimes after 50 minutes of discussing a poem, I still don't feel like I have a very good grasp on it.
While open discussion is certainly good and necessary for something like poetry, I think maybe a more focused, rigorous directing when discussing might be helpful to keep us on the right track. Sometimes I feel like we're a little too open with all the ideas and conjectures presented (i.e. drug trip interpretations on certain poems). While it's certainly beneficial to maintain an environment conducive to a variety of interpretations, sometimes there's such a lack of concrete evidence from canon to the point where, if we spend time discussing them and hence accept them as valid, then any arbitrary interpretation can be considered valid and we could go in circles all day.
I wanted that lecture as well, since modernism is so much different from what I am used to. Then comes Williams to slam down the whole idea of lecturing--
I guess we're too used to having a single, correct answer since we've been educated in such environment so far. But Natalia brought up the point that poems may not really have such thing as "the message it is trying to convey."
Lectures are basically shoving ideas down our minds (like mom lecturing about not doing so and so)But they may be empty since we don't know exactly why we aren't suppose to do such thing. If we just spit back out ideas we learn from the lecture, then we're as Williams say: plagiarizing.
As a result, we would lack imagination.
Then I looked back at the discussion we did in class and thought that Natalia did a fair job in guiding it. In the end, I actually think discussion is more fruitful than lecture.
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