The Poisoning of Socrates
As a USU alumnus who still receives the Statesman email edition, I was humored by the article “Students suffer from Power Point poisoning,” until I realized that it wasn’t another tongue in cheek gag by Dennis Hinkamp, but actually purports to be an honest to goodness point of view on what is wrong with university education. Heaven forbid students take notes or read slides.If professors really were to read every line in class verbatim from a PowerPoint slide at an average speed of 150 words per minute (considered the norm for good speaking), the slides would have to contain 7500 words for a 50 minute presentation with no breaks (assuming a complete loss of the “stimulating discussion,” as bemoaned by the authors). This equates to 45 slides full of 20 point text with absolutely no pictures or titles, or about 200 slides per lecture with titles, bulleted text, and a few pictures. It also translates to 150 minutes of typing for each lecture if the professor types at a steady rate of 50 words per minute. Anyone who knows the lecture well enough to type it at 50 words per minute without stopping isn’t going to waste his or her time by typing something, then spend the entire class lecture reading the slides verbatim. We might as well close the libraries on campus and count on oral dissemination for everything. Perhaps we could get the Utah legislature to draft an education overhaul proposition similar to HB 331 requiring all Utah instructors to present information orally and offer stimulating discussion without requiring students to read or copy notes.The concern that students will not retain information from the written word was eloquently described by Socrates when he said, “they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.” Perhaps Socrates was correct, and we should go back to sitting at the feet of our professors in rapt and engaging memorization, rather than being expected to learn to read. Socrates was likely a wonderful memorizer. Of course, we would have never known this if Plato didn’t write.
Glen Ritchie519-98-1078(229)391-2695