Comment by sky2224
20 days ago
> If you want to learn, you need to make an effort and extract knowledge from this source.
Oh I'm 100% aware of this, and actually think it's better than the push system that school prior to college follows. The issue is that the content is significantly worse now.
There ends up being a lot of guesswork today of finding resources that are good. I always have to question: "does this person actually know what they're talking about or am I wasting my time?" I'm sure you had to do this back in your day, but with the overwhelming amount of information available, it becomes difficult to parse.
I would kill for a class where the professor just said, "Everything you need is in that book." Now we get, "The book doesn't talk about this, but you should know..." It's infuriating.
Yes, the first encounter with a professor not knowing well the thing he was teaching was a mild shock. But, thought I, that professor had been a student back in the day, he also knows how to quickly prepare to the basics, and then just wing it, hoping that nobody is going to dig deeper.
After that I just started believing books more than some professors, as long as the books cross-checked with one another.
Recently a friend of mine, herself a professor, watched how some other professor, invited to give a special lecture, was obviously out of their depth in certain questions that they should know like the back of their hand in order to give such lectures. She was pretty depressed by that, and especially by the fact that her students might be fed incomplete or even wrong information. So the problem is there, is known, and is not an illusion :(
While at it, no one book contains all that you should know about a subject, if you want to know it well. Not the Feynman Lectures. Not Code Complete. Not even the Mahabharata. You always get to read more. (I'm not talking about the formal exam questions here, of course.)
> While at it, no one book contains all that you should know about a subject, if you want to know it well. Not the Feynman Lectures. Not Code Complete. Not even the Mahabharata. You always get to read more. (I'm not talking about the formal exam questions here, of course.)
Absolutely, and I'd like to clarify, I'm not expecting a single physics book to cover all there is to know about electricity and magnetism. I just mean for a particular course (where the purpose of the course is to expose me to the topic) to be centered around a book properly, in which new topics that aren't in the book aren't introduced (within reason of course)
It depends on the subject, of course. By the time someone has written a book on "programming language du jour" (say, Rust right now), and gotten it published and printed, it will be 1-2 years out of date. And students will complain that "all the information is online for free". Except, it's really hard to point at a specific website that is not in your (the professor's) control to say "everything you need is in here" when it could be taken offline tomorrow. Or reorganized and re-written in such a way that content is added or removed.
The course I think I did the best in teaching was to say "here is the textbook" (on databases) and then when a specific solution / technique came up, to point out that "this is how mysql does it", or "this one is used by postgres", etc.