What are We about: Learning, Teaching or Lecturing? Those who have taught chemistry at the post-secondary level for any length of time undoubtedly have been asked by students to critique their personal statments. Such statements, which are generally required in applications to professional schools, are expected to provide insights into a student's nonquantifiahle, noncognitive characteristics as well as their ability to write and think clearly. These elements can he quite revealing in other ways. For example, when students write ahout themselves and without guile, they often disclose some of their more primordial characteristics. At this level, apparently diverse students have a lot in common. Students often describe themselves as being "fascinated with" and as having a "great interest in" or having been "captivated by" science and its applications. They allude to a "child like curiosity" that makes them continually ask "why?" and to the "lure of the unknown." Some speak of "mysticism" when referring to science and/or science-related subjects such as medicine. Most students see the world as "challenging" and "interesting." They are generally "excited" and "enthusiastic" a t the prospect of learning. They expect their science-related experiences to he "intellectually stimulating" and "rewarding." Clearly we have interesting and interested students in our classrooms. How do we as teachers and the educational system respond to students with such a spectrum of interesting characteristics? Generally we lecture to them. That special relationship between teacher and student that Socrates described as the coming together of friends (although students may not put it in exactly these words) is not commonly perceived by today's undergraduates. Unfortunately, rather than emphasizing the mutuality of the teaching endeavor, the lecture system often leads to the separation of the teacher and the student. In an effort to reach students-to bridge this separation-when conditions dictate use of the lecture method, teachers tend to develop certain lecture styles. Indeed, lecture performances often have a way of becoming stereotyped to the extent that analogies can he drawn with other professions. There are lecturers who are, in effect, preachers. They exhort and cajole a somnolent congregation to commit itself to the cause. Success is measured by the number of souls sufficiently stirred to either enlist in the cause or reject it vehemently. The lecturer as shepherd gathers and watches over a flock clearly less enlightened than he is. The shepherd is usually evaluated by the width of the gulf separating his wisdom from that of his flock. Some lecturers appear to be related to museum curators. As is befitting a connoisseur, this kind of lecturer points out
the rarities of the subject to the uninitiated and often dwells on the obscure. Since he tends to assume his audience cannot understand him, anyway, the curator has no compunction about sprinkling his presentation with foreign words and phrases, especially Greek and Latin, and with English so esoteric as to sound foreign. There is a real possibility that such a professor will convince most of his students that the subject is the province of a secret society with its own arcane practices and a vocabulary unique to its members, never to he revealed to anyone else. The curator's colleagues measure his success by the paucity of initiates retained by the winnowing process. The lecturer as actor plays to a passive audience. Some actors have a hit of the magician in them as they lure spectators to witness the academic sleight-of-hand; some incorporate a touch of the stand-up comedian in their performances as they play to their audiences to register laughs loud enough to drown out the lecturer droning on next door. Actors' successes are measured by the size of the crowd. A second cousin to the lecturer as actor is the lecturer as salesman, who takes his product to the people wherever they are. He tailors his pitch to convincing students that the effort they will expend is worth the price; his success is also measured by attendance. Finally there is the lecturer as researcher. He is taciturn and solitary, disdains the "performing arts," and is content to mutter an assortment of facts to the youthful audience which is only dimly perceived beyond his glasses. The researcher's measure of success is in his student's ability to regurgitate the facts. These analogies are, of course, strongly drawn. Yet each contains the essence of characteristics that are easily discerned in many lecturers individually and collectively. None of these too commonly observed lecture styles even remotely anticipates the self-eradicating features that should be implicit in the teaching process, uiz., that those who have truly mastered what their teacher has presented no longer need him. None of these lecture modes admits active participation or a sense of all-encompassing intellectual excitement as a necessary component in the process of education. The teacher as lecturer should not he a pleader, a performer, or a huckster-yet this is what too often happens to "fascinated and curious" students in their first university- or college-level science courses. So this, perhaps, is a t least in part the basis of the frequent complaint that students seem to believe that the critical part of education in the sciences involves the acquisition of facts and procedures-rather than the sharpening of curiosity or the acquisition of problem-solving skills. JJL
Volume 62
Number 2
February 1985
91
