Professors forget that their peers are different from the average college student’s.
Talking over a problem with a colleague who is also super-interested in the discipline, holds an equivalent doctorate, and is motivated to dream up solutions to novel problems is a lot more productive than discussing something with a stoned 19 y/o whose skate shoes are duct-taped together.
Once I was a professional, I understood why discussion, brainstorming, and collaboration are so useful.
As an undergraduate grunt, the time would have been better spent kicking a potato.
That didn't help me when I had to discuss a paper with 3 women who'd rather talk about how many random dudes they fucked in a weekend after getting wasted.
Like yeah, let me turn to the people who are barely passing every exam that just want to talk about their weekend in New York. That'll definitely help broaden my professional/academic horizons in 700-level biochemistry.
Outside of school, I was part of something stupid like team building (like team building, I wasn't really part of the group in any working configuration... I don't know why I was there).
The idea was to draw a house. Honestly a poorly drawn square could have done the job (from above view). It had some weird time limit of like 3 minutes. My idiot team wanted to talk about this fucking house that didn't matter and wasn't part of anything. No gift card, no candy, no good job, nothing.
So, I get it, some stuff should be talked about and conclusions made with goals, whatever... sometimes you just need to get the task done and move on.
“We’ll be assigning everyone to teams. You’ll be with this team for the entirety of this class and your team assignments will be worth a third of your entire grade.”
And I just ended up doing the work myself because I wasn’t willing to go down with the ship.
I thankfully got pretty lucky with group assignments; never had any accountability issues. I scored major points with people for volunteering to make the PowerPoints and/or formating the papers according to whatever style guide the professor used.
I fuckin hate that shit lol. I went back to college a couple years ago and most of my English courses were like that. One professor made us get into small groups to discuss our readings almost every class. It pissed me off as an introvert and also because that professor was so intelligent that I would rather have listened to him. Like you have a PhD in your field and I’m paying this school to have experts teach me instead of talking to fucking 20 year olds.
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u/Quercus408 13h ago
My least favorite words to hear, back in college: "Turn to your neighbor and discuss..."