Right. What is the purpose of 1,000 person lecture halls, nowadays – why not just provide a lecture accessible on the web? Then you could also provide a transcript or lecture notes at the same time. This seems much more convenient, flexible, and useful to me.

Of the three institutions I’ve been to (UC Davis, Sonoma State University, and the Santa Rosa Junior College), “prestige” was inversely proportional to the quality of education.

At times, I honestly wondered how many professors at UCD were actually there to teach or were genuinely concerned about their students, particularly undergrads. Probably relatively few, I’m guessing. The best instructors I had usually had only masters degrees, as well.

I taught Special Education (light to moderate) and have a learning disability, myself, so I’m extremely (perhaps overly) sensitive and understanding to the problems that arise when the two brains involved on the opposite ends of a learning process are wired completely differently, want different things, or have different expectations. What I experienced at Davis vs. the JC was like night and day.

So in what ways did the two differ? The JC gave me much greater freedom to learn in a way that was appropriate for me and provided much greater interaction between teacher and student. The thousand-person lecture hall format isn’t exactly flexible, nor does it lend itself well to multiple styles of learning. I can’t help but think those who think it’s actually effective are either insensitive to peoples’ needs or just plain don’t care.

And Dean Pusey? In his 80s when I took the class in Russian lit, he first gave us a questionnaire where each student filled in our interests, aspirations, dreams, etc.

Then, every test was geared toward where our minds were likely to head. I thought at the time I’d become either a writer or filmmaker (I became a novelist, later), my tests were filled with “what key scenes would you choose to keep in if you were to make a movie of this story, and what would you throw out — and why?” and various other permutations.

It made me realize what I’d been missing out on in college — someone who actually looked at where I put my energies and found a way to draw them out from me into the subject matter, and also match that subject matter with my deepest interests.

It was, hands down, the best class I ever took in my life, I thought more deeply about the subject and the work at hand than I did for nearly any other class.

Also, there are many kinds of thinking, but do you seriously not think that there is something distinctive about the kind of thinking that professors do that makes it appropriate that it be taught, if at all possible, in schools? People have ALWAYS had many kinds of thinking, but the rise of science created one very distinctive very novel sort of world, largely by cultivating the synthesis of philosophical/mathematical and mechanical/empirical thinking. Everyone knows that human brains don’t need to be taught how to think in general, but they do need to be taught how to think scientifically, hence every culture has thought but only some have science.

Finally, all children think, most adults mostly pattern match instead, which generally works better. I wish that nerdy adults who knew how to think were given good instruction in how to act, play chess, and do other types of pattern matching.