Summary to 'Is anybody listening?'

In ’Is Anybody Listening,’ David Daniels claims that students required to be immersed in the discussion in the smaller classes will terminate students’ passivity and benefit students. According to Daniels, the lecture system has caused fierce controversy for many centuries. The lecturer was not challenged very often because of the scarcity of books. Likewise, the condition still exists nowadays. He gives an example of Mary witnessing the disadvantages of lecture system and then realizing that ‘the professor is as bored as his audiences nodding off or doodling in their textbooks.’ He says that ‘students must learn to listen before they can listen to learn,’ a useful tip for most of learners who are inclined to think instead of attentively listening. Finally, he suggests that students should be responsible for their ‘intellectual growth’ rather than depend on the professor only. Otherwise, the professor would sloppily lecture and not be beneficial to students. In fact, I have found that the ‘lecture system’ has influenced my life and the lives of people in many significant ways.

There were so many uncreative and compulsory lectures that I barely learned anything while I was still a freshman. Every class, students just sat down, opened the textbook, paid attention to the slides, and then turned into dozing off or daydreaming with their notebooks because professors only repeated exactly the same content from both slides and textbooks. That’s why professors are as bored as their audiences. Hence, either side is wiser than the other. Even worse, listeners only browsed through textbooks and memorized a list of unimportant truism for the final exam. Then they forget much of what they have memorized. I had two required classes, Introduction To Business and General Knowledge Lectures. I am so happy at that time due to the fact that I would have more understandings about the field of marketing. With the passion for marketing, I always preview every chapter that the professor will lecture and go over what I have learned. Nevertheless, I am gradually disappointed at the impersonality of the lecture system that professors taught in a boring way and forfeit the ability of learning driven by motivation. Only until I am junior and senor will I be able to choose the subjects interesting to me.

Big classes which seldom required students to bury themselves into discussions alienate the interaction between students and professors. Students are unique and have their own critical thinking toward everything. It’s much harder in big classes for listeners to share their ideas or questions with professors and classmates. Then, audiences can only listen attentively in order to acquire their desirable knowledge. However, there is a research showing that most learners can assimilate information easier through discussion instead of listening attentively. After all, the more you ponder about know-how, the more relevant it will be to you. I had a very good friend, Joseph, throwing up his questions to professors very often. Owing to the big size of classes, he usually couldn’t discuss with professors and in fact they are not so willing to respond to the spontaneous questions that students brought up. Hence, Joseph makes up his up to drop out of his college life because of his poor interaction with professors.

Seldom challenged approaches of unidirectional lecture would result in many social problems. Students -always learning from lecturers without pursuing their desirable knowledge- don’t have enough creativity and independent thinking. Once they encountered real difficulties in the world, they are not capable of solving fickle problems. In other word, they don’t even try to deal with fickle difficulties because they believe in one answer to the problem and are extremely inflexible to finger another solution out. Gradually, the suicide rate soars higher and higher owning to the fact that they never know what lives are and incline to evade the pressure. Likewise, because of their concrete minds toward jobs, they can’t endure the hard toil of the job to the end, complained all the time, and quit jobs easily. Therefore, unemployment rate is also getting higher and higher recently. One of my good friends, Jack, committed suicide three years ago. He, graduating from technical school, majored in computer science. He smoothly found his first job as a computer operator as soon as he fulfilled his compulsory military. However, he found that there were so many groups in the company, and he was forced take sides instead of being impartial. In addition, the orders from the supervisor would sometimes conflict with that of the leading manager. With the concrete mind and inflexible thinking, he decided to commit suicide because he doesn’t know how to solve it. Then what he remained is the brutal truth, making his friends inclusive of me and his family inconsolable

David Daniels has raised an issue that shocks us all, for all of us, in our lecture system, making consequences bad in the long run. We seldom face the long-existing lecture system. I am resigned to the system and awaited better when I am a junior and senior, and then I can be empowered to choose my desirable class; audiences in a relationship wishes that professors can interact with students, respond to their questions, and enhance mutual understandings and knowledge; and people gradually forfeiting the abilities of flexible and critical thinking lead miserable lives because of concrete mind that lecture system causes. We are, indeed, all victims of the lecture system. Maybe that lecture has been an inflexible curse on humankind for a long time.