Autopilot
"A lecture is where information moves from the notes of the professor to the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either." - My old philosophy professor
Today in Cell Bio, the professor put up a slide about microarrays. Now, in all fairness, I'm working on microarrays in my research project, so there wasn't anything here I didn't already know. However, even if this had been new material, I still wouldn't have done what everyone else seemed to be doing.
The hand-drawn slide showed two nuclei, and each contained a DNA strand with eight (8) genes on it, labelled "a" through "h." Well, as far as I could see, everyone copied down these complicated diagrams to the letter. Then the professor shaded in some of the genes to show which ones were expressed in each cell. My classmates copied these shadings exactly. The professor drew an expression profile for each cell - one cell showed red splotches for genes that were expressed, the other green. Finally, he combined the two profiles into one, so genes that were expressed in both cells turned yellow.
It was completely unnecessary to copy every little shading of every gene in the example (and in the same colors, I might add - people bring markers). Anyone who had been listening could have summarized it in two or three sentences. But I saw so many heads bobbing, as people looked up to the screen and down to their notebooks, that I almost got seasick. The professor asked a question that anyone who had followed the explanation could have answered, but no one did, because they were all still bobbing and tuning out the distracting Japanese guy shouting at them from the front of the room. Later on, he showed another slide and said we didn't need to copy it because it's in the textbook and it's not important anyway, but the pencils started flying, and when he took it off the projector, several people made that forced exhalation noise that signifies righteous indignation.
I think these people are on autopilot. They switch off their minds, and maybe even their ears, at the beginning of class. The diagrams travel from the projector to the screen to the student's eyes to the student's hands to the student's notebook, without any extraneous detours through, for example, the student's cerebral cortex. They go to class to copy the notes (which are later available online), not to follow along with the lecture, let alone to think or learn. Maybe that's why they seem so outraged when the lecture goes too long, as if the University were paying them to attend rather than vice versa.
Or maybe some people's minds never switch on in the first place...