Uptown downtown, lefttown right,
Who’s your momma, who’s your pappa,
… fight, fight…

flight.

Snowing and raining. I feel good today, mostly from great training last night. I’m sore as a motherfucker and it’s good.

There’s a movement in higher education away from the “Sage on the Stage” and towards “Guide on the Side” method of instruction. The way some people talk about “lecture” you’d think it was actually evil, maybe some kind of dictator-driven tyranny of communication.

I hate this argument. Yes, there are boring lectures and they suck. Yes, for some things, other ways of teaching and communicating are better. But there are times when the Sage on the Stage is best. Indeed, there are times when a good lecture can even be artful and beautiful, a deep expression and sharing of self that can lead to an educational outcome that’s unparalleled. It can motivate, but most of all the good lecture can open the mind, truly, by the connectedness that can occur between Sage and Student.

Sometimes learners are too distracted with how much they want to suddenly know, and what they think “knowing” is and how to do it,  to actually know anything. By equating “learning” with a “download” analogy of knowledge and thought, people will lose something of immense importance for the survival of humanity.

We need to listen attentively to people who have solved great problems, grown influential new ideas or, through their work, changed the way we perceive. That person might not be a charismatic speaker, but the need doesn’t change. It’s up to us, the learners, to attend to what they say. Their legitimacy comes from their actual contributions in whatever form, and we can disagree on those kinds of things and choose who we should or shouldn’t listen to. But that choice can’t come from how engaging the lecture is– the lecture is just a person speaking. Rather, it must come from the ideas that are present, and the processes being described, the person speaking.

Such as the way the most popular movies require the attention span of mere adolescents lest they become “too slow” and “boring” despite the ideas, the implications or the art of the film, if lectures are viewed similarly, we lose something great. It’s the same as the lost skill of reading, now in favor of clips, snippets and bullets. The point is it’s not the same. The bulleted version does not contain the same meanings as the full essay. The two are not the same. The summary is not the story. The conclusion is not the argument. You can’t condense a person into a snippet. If we train a new generation of learners to view information in this way, people will get lost along the way.