Whatever your grade level, whatever your grades, what- ever your major, whatever your ultimate career goal, we all have one thing in common: the classroom
experience.
Most teachers utilize the classroom setting as an opportunity to embellish and interpret material covered in the text and other assigned readings. If you always complete your reading assignments before class, you’ll be able to devote your classroom time to the new material the teacher will undoubtedly cover.
You’ve Got to Have Class
Exactly how you’ll use the skills we’ll cover in this chapter will be influ- enced by two factors: the type of classroom setup and the particular methods and styles employed by each of your teachers.
Each of the following general class formats will require you to make adjustments to accomplish your goals.
Lectures: Podium Pleasantries
Pure lectures are quite common from the college level up, but exist only rarely at the high school level. Lecture halls at larger colleges may fill up with hundreds of students for some of the more popular courses (or introductory classes, particularly in the sciences).
Primary emphases: listening; note taking.
Discussions: Time to Speak Your Mind
Also called tutorials and seminars, discussion groups are, again, com- mon on the college level, often as adjuncts to courses boasting particularly large enrollments. A typical weekly schedule for such a course might consist of two lectures and one or more discussion groups. Often led by graduate teaching assistants, these discussion groups contain fewer students—usually no more than two dozen— and give you the chance to discuss points made in the lecture and material from assigned readings.
Such groups rarely follow a precise text or format and may wander wildly from topic to topic, once again pointing out the need for a general mastery of the course material, the “jumping off ” point for discussion.
Primary emphases: asking/answering questions; analyzing concepts and ideas; taking part in discussion.
Combination: The Best (or Worst) of Both
Some postsecondary courses are, for want of a better term, com- bination classes—they combine the lecture and discussion formats (the typical kind of precollege class you’re probably used to). The teacher prepares a lesson plan of material he or she wants to cover in a specific class. Through lecture, discussion, question and answer, audiovisual presentation, or a combination of one or more such devices, the material is covered.
Your preparation for this type of class will depend to a great extent on the approach of each individual instructor. Such classes also occur on the postsecondary level—college, graduate school, trade school— when class size is too small for a formal lecture approach.
Primary emphases: note taking; listening; participation; asking and answering questions.
Handson: Getting Your Hands Dirty
Classes such as science labs and various vocational education courses (industrial arts, graphics, and so forth) occur at all levels from high school up. They are concerned almost exclusively with doing some- thing— completing a particular experiment, working on a project, whatever. The teacher may demonstrate certain things before letting the students work on their own, but the primary emphasis is on the student carrying out his or her own projects while in class.
On the college level, science labs are usually overseen by graduate assistants. Trade schools may use a combination of short lectures, demonstrations, and handson workshops; you can’t become a good auto mechanic just by reading a book on cleaning a distributor.
Primary emphasis: development and application of particular manual and technical skills.
Exceptions to the Rule
Rarely can a single class be neatly pigeonholed into one of these formats, though virtually all will be primarily one or another. It would seem that size is a key factor in choosing a format, but you can’t always assume, for example, that a large lecture course, filled with 200 or more students, will feature a professor standing behind a rostrum reading from his prepared text. Or that a small class of a dozen people will tend to be all discussion.
During my college years, I had a religion teacher who, though his class was one of the more popular on campus and regularly drew 300 or more students to each session, rarely lectured at all. I never knew what to expect when entering his classroom. One week it would be a series of musical improvisations from a local jazz band, with a variety of graduate assistants talking about out-of-body experiences. Another session would consist entirely of the professor arguing with a single student over one key topic...which had nothing to do with that week’s (or any other week’s) assignment.
In another class of merely 20 students, the professor teaching us physical chemistry would march in at the sound of the bell and, with- out acknowledging anyone’s presence or saying a word, walk to the blackboard and start writing equations. He would wordlessly work his way across the massive board, until, some 20 or 30 minutes later, he ran off the right side. Slowly, he would walk back to the left side...and start writing all over again. He never asked questions. Never asked for questions. In fact, I’m not sure I remember him uttering anything for three solid months!
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