Knowledge Gap

As much as we're frustrated by our professors seeming inability to understand us as students or teach effectively, they must also be frustrated that their hard efforts don't seem to have any kind of effect.

I'm taking a class on how to teach STEM classes at the university level, in part, I confess, because I was so dissatisfied with the way some of my classes were taught.  I was lucky for the most part at Berkeley. I had some amazing professors in both lecture and lab courses who knew and explicitly told us exactly what they expected us to learn from the course and what was going to be on the test, and then they organized the class and wrote assignments and tests to reflect this. I've also had professors that read off slides, treated us like 5-year olds, completely lost the students and didn't realize that there were questions because they never looked away from the board, and apologized for what the course covered. Biology classes often seemed unnecessarily memorization heavy. Math classes (and some chemistry) seemed like you had to do a ton of learning off the internet because there was no way to follow what the teacher was saying, either because the pacing was off, or because the teacher was just unaware of where the students really were. There's a reason for why all of this happens - the knowledge gap.

When you are an expert in something, the structure of the knowledge in your mind is such that concepts are connected to each other for easy retrieval and use. New knowledge then sticks much more easily. For beginners, there's not that existing structure for new knowledge to stick to, so facts often seem like they're disconnected. Memorization take a lot more work, and it's harder to understand concepts. Everyone starts out like this. The problem occurs when experts don't remember what it's like to be a beginner. That's why the best teachers are often TAs, who have less of a knowledge gap, or people who had a lot of trouble learning the material the first time around. Those people had to be more conscious about building up their knowledge structures the first time around. However, our professors are brilliant. Many of them didn't have any trouble with learning what they now teach, or have been in the field so long that they've forgotten what it's like to be a student. And unlike teachers in grades K-12, they never had to get degrees in education. At research-heavy institutions, they might not even be asked to give a teaching portfolio when they apply for faculty positions.

This doesn't make taking these classes any less frustrating, but at least now it's understandable.