So...is the NYT saying that women and minorities aren’t smart enough to follow a basic lecture?
For crying out loud. What is it...a slow news day. What a bunch of PC crap.
Women are 33% more likely to earn college degrees than men.
I guess if college lectures stopped being so “unfair”, the number of men with degrees would further decrease. And we could throw rocks at them.
What would the world be like if it was inhabited only by women and minorities?
I was about to say, if college lectures are biased, why are more women and minorities going to college now than white males?
The article reads like it was written by a freshman college student, masking her displeasure with getting a bad grade as a journalistic piece
I hope lectures do discriminate. We need more not less discrimination. We need separation of the best and brightest from the dross.
Oh geesh, every damn thing in our society is somehow automatically “white” as well as “male” so IT discriminates. I’m amazed how everything only fits 1 precise demographic, and doesn’t happen to work for any others?
Well, actually, (I didn’t read yet, forgive) does it discriminate against orientals?
Because they seem to do pretty well in anything, even math a science in a crowd from a distance.
OK, so maybe lecture halls aren’t great for me, a girl - I know I seemed to have a hard time with it - but I’d hardly call it discrimination.
Apparently being black is a learning disability.
OK, I agree. Intelligence is a “White Privilege.”
OK... so they don’t understand standard English. Well, what’s the alternative? More written instruction? Wait, the people who have difficulty understanding spoken English usually have reading deficits too.
The article itself shows that lectures do not favor white males. Several quotes from the article completely explain what is going on here.
“...we learn new material by anchoring it to knowledge we already possess. The same lecture, given by the same professor in the same lecture hall, is actually not the same for each student listening; students with more background knowledge will be better able to absorb and retain what they hear.”
So students who are prepared for college can learn new stuff easier.
“In the structured course, all demographic groups reported completing the readings more frequently and spending more time studying; all groups also achieved higher final grades than did students in the lecture course.”
So if you do all the work you are supposed to do, you get better grades.
What the author doesn’t realize is that she is saying that minorities and women are less prepared for college and have poor study skills. She tries to pin their problems on outside factors, when in fact she is showing the problems are with the students and not the teaching format.
Ho-Lee-Crap! If someone cannot learn by lectures, notes, memorization, then practice; they are mentally challenged. Period. In some way, shape, form, or severity; there is a mental disability that needs to be a dressed. There is no bias it’s just the way it is.
There may be a grain of truth there.
If you went to a school where the teacher did well to merely prevent riots, rapes and gang fights during class, and somehow graduated, you may be completely out of your element trying to learn from a lecture. Even if you are bright, motivated and somehow got into a good college despite coming from such a hell hole.
It SEEMS like the natural and normal way for someone like me who went to decent schools, but I’ve tutored people who, while intelligent and motivated, weren’t very good at taking notes, a skill I had mastered by 9th grade.
Just as I know people much smarter than myself who score nowhere nearly as well on tests as I do, I like taking them and test so far above my actual ability and knowledge that sometimes I’ve ended up placed in classes that I was in no way ready for.
Yes, a silly premise on the face of it, but maybe it makes a bit of sense to spend resources in finding the intelligent and motivated students who need the study skills that someone like myself who went to good schools- and had both parents highly interested in my academic progress- assimilated early. IMHO, there’s a germ of truth, however horribly perverted to the cause of political correctness.
Just a devil’s advocate .02 :-)
I imagine that college lectures discriminate most against stupid people, so it’s completely outrageous for the NYT to insinuate that everyone who is not white, male and affluent are stupid.
"I'm OK, you're OK. My Reality is not your Reality."
"Whatever"
(we must not be oppressed by facts and objective truth!)
/sarc
The author is trying to garner support for “active learning” which “provides increased structure, feedback and interaction”. “The instructors may pose questions about the week’s reading, for example, and require students to answer the questions online, for a grade, before coming to class.” In other words students are spoon fed information online ahead of time and forced to draw the same conclusions that the instructor has decided are correct if they want a passing grade. You will get graded on your “global warming” class based on agreeing with the material before even hearing your leftist professor’s “lecture”. The author believes that the professor will be able to spend more time at home smoking or eating his medicinal marijuana and not have to face the discomfort of speaking in front of a group with possibly skeptical individuals in it.
Throwing racial and sexual discrimination in at the beginning was just away of capturing the target audience of gullible morons from the first sentence. The author’s goal was to stir them up so they would accept everything else that followed.
These wackos need to leave.