Dealing with Poor Professors

“I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.” -Socratese

Sometimes, it seems like Socratese’s words are prophetic when we find those professors who are “brilliant” but can’t teach students.  Maybe they are terrible lecturers, maybe they don’t care about anything besides their research, or maybe they don’t understand students, but sometimes, professors just don’t do a good job of teaching material.  Here are some ways to learn in spite of your professor’s teaching ineptitude.

Read

A graduate instructor for a class once told me that if I read the books and didn’t come to lectures, I should be able to get a B easily.  In no way am I trying to condone not going to lecture, but sometimes textbooks can be more effective than lectures for learning.  Sometimes, professors will separate lectures from readings but most of the time, the lectures mirror material from the books and if you don’t get the lectures, you can try to see if you can understand their source.

Office Hours

Some professors just can’t handle teaching large classes, so try the more intimate setting of office hours.  Concepts that are hard to explain in lectures might make more sense one on one where professors can cater analogies and examples to fit your knowledge base.  Of course, some professors are just terrible one on one and in lectures but you should at least try to go to office hours and find out if the professors can’t lecture or can’t teach in general.

Section/GSIs

I once took a political economy course at Berkeley with an Indian professor.  He seemed knowledgeable and great but I had the hardest time understanding his lectures because of his accent.  Moreover, he lectured in a monotone that bored me and I struggled to keep up with his lectures.  Things were made a lot easier by my section gsi.  He was able to show us what the professor thought was critical to understand and helped explain difficult concepts and I learned more from him in section than I did from lecture.  Also, he was responsible for grading midterms and papers so he was able to tell us exactly what he expected us to know and how he would grade our exams.  For that particular class, section proved invaluable to me as a resource for learning.