This term I'm taking a (graduate) course which is crucial for my degree. The teacher's plan for the course is quite ambitious and all along he's been following the structure of a given text, but he doesn't follow it completely and quite often omits (what I consider) key results from it, e.g. resu...
Good pedagogy is organized around objectives, not texts. It sounds like your objectives are different from the teacher's. In graduate education it is reasonable to expect you to study independently.
Do other students in the course share your opinion? If yes, you may have a point. Otherwise, it's probably simply that his style of exposition does not suit you. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with any of you, just that it's not possible to suit everyone's preferences. I often find that I do not like the exposition even of material written by the biggest names of my field.
Just as a note: I do study by myself, part of my discomfort comes from the fact I'm learning from the book rather from of the course. In any case I think that remark may be in the end the answer to my question.
@fkraiem The only people (two) people I've asked don't even check the references, they solely rely in the course notes. This may hint towards your idea, though.
This doesn't answer your question about 'how' - it's a suggestion to do something different. If the teacher follows the text, then you don't need both. It may be that the teacher has a different idea about what's important than what you do. Try reading the text BEFORE the relevant lecture and learn the specific terms or information from the book, but then listen to the lecture to understand what the teacher is presenting about how the concepts fit together. It's graduate school, you are expected to think and learn for yourself, not just recite sections of the book in some exam.
Graduate school is a step firmly down the path of an intention to become an autonomous learning machine. By this point, you should have acquired, and be committed to improving, the skill to learn from any and every available source. The prof is a source of learning; the text is a source of learning. You should learn as much as you can from both. You should feel fortunate that the sum of learning from both is greater than that of just a single source. Graduate school aims to make independent researchers. If you want a prof to simply spoon-feed the text, frankly, you've chosen the wrong path.
Textbooks are not sacred. In fact, quite often their content is partly determined by non-scientific factors. And the judgement of faculty has to be worth something more than their capacity to recite from a book onto the blackboard, etc.
I had an experience like this in one class (Calc 4/Diff Eq). Finished all the required material by 2/3 of the way through the semester and we were able to move on to some really cool stuff that I would never have been exposed to otherwise. You know what, most of those things that looked like they might have been important when viewed in-line, were clearly minor steps when viewed in hindsight.
On the other hand, from the teacher's perspective, once you have had that ah-ha moment on a given topic and everything becomes obvious, it can be hard to step back and see it from the uninitiated P.O.V. again, and to recognize which (now obvious) pieces were important to their enlightenment. Being able to do this, in my experience, can be the difference between a good teacher and a fantastic teacher. Not recognizing or acknowledging this can be an issue can be the difference between a passable and a horrible teacher.
I think there's a very important lesson here for educators. The organization and structure of a course are critically important to students at every level. As a student, I often felt frustrated that a course with great content was held back by my inability to piece all of it together into a meaningful whole (one that I knew existed and was obvious to the teacher). Now, as a teacher, I try to place each lecture within the bigger picture of the whole course, and to make that structure as explicit as possible to the students.
Teachers have every right to structure their courses how they choose, and plodding through a textbook is rarely particularly inspiring or enjoyable. However, in designing a syllabus, we should strive to have a structure as robust as any textbook. As a TA, I heard the OP's complaint/suggestion on many occasions.
If the textbook does a great job covering everything missed, read it. That's why it's there. If you miss something that you need to truly grasp what's going on but the text is insufficient (or even if you just learn better when dudeboy explains it) go see him during office hours. That's what office hours are for. If you actually need to convey that he should cover material he skipped, however, just say so, a la: "I think you would do better to cover/spend more time on (whatever it is that you think he missed)." or "I'd have understood this better if...", per truth.
@Shane Your comments definitely need to draw more attention, they are spot on. I'm pretty sure a lot of my problems in this class originate from a lack of global perspective.
Most of the comments, if not all, have been as useful for me as any of the answers posted below. I feel like it wouldn't contribute at all to tag +10 usernames in a comment or leave +10 comments thanking everyone who posted a piece of advice in here. I think Shane spotted the origin of my problem (which I hadn't), while others what I should start doing (and didn't do before) to solve it: mainly communicating outside class. I certainly take other things which I don't mention out of all of this too.
Discussion on question by hjhjhj57: H…
Discussion on question by hjhjhj57: H…