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According to my Indian friends, it’s self teaching all the way down. The professors read off PowerPoint slides because they’d rather be doing research, and the students skip class to watch YouTube videos from random Indians explaining the course material (among other things).
Although the Indians I know are software engineers who left India, so it might not be like that at all the colleges.
I feel like they were slightly exaggerating for dramatic effect. Isn't the default expectation in higher education that you try and grapple with most of the material yourself, including through auto-didactic approaches or reference to online material? I seriously doubt there's a single reputable college anywhere where the students come in, get taught literally everything they need in a lecture hall, and aren't expected to do anything when they leave.
The situation your friends describe wouldn't apply to any med school. The lectures are thorough, but you still have to go home, crack open the books and make things stick.
Teachers are obligated to teach and students have an obligation to learn. This was brought home to me once by a really formative experience I had in high school I’ll never forget.
I once did a placement test across a couple subjects because the faculty didn’t feel I was properly suited to the classrooms I was in. I scored well above everyone else and I got switched to go into a calculus class one school year with a lot of other students. The whole time, the lot of the students didn’t like the class and complained that it was “too difficult” and our teacher was an older but good instructor that increasingly got upset with the low performance of a lot of us. So one day he switched things up.
We come into class in the morning and he announces there’s a pop quiz for all of us. He hands out a multipage, stapled document face down and tells us to very closely follow the instructions before taking it. Once he told us to begin I flipped it over, read everything on the first page, turned it back down and moved it to the corner of the desk. Literally every other kid dove right into answering problems. I was the “only” guy who got an A on the assignment. Every other kid in a class of near 30 failed it. F.
On the very bottom of the first page, there was a sentence that said, “Do not take this assignment.” He gave the whole class a very long lecture the following the day, when everyone got the exam back. His point was one I greatly internalized later in life. I’m no different than anyone else is. I was simply good at whatever I chose to pay attention to. If I put my focus on reading Instagram reels and Facebook posts all day, I’ll be on top of the world as far as what goes on in that realm. If I place my attention in my studies and apply myself, my knowledge will so for that as well. The other kids in class complained that it was difficult, but they never applied themselves or paid any attention. The teacher did his job. The students did not.
Star Wars had it right.
That teacher was being a jerk. Maybe by following the teacher's instructions with exact literalness you can pass, but the world doesn't work without making assumptions and writing a test like that deliberately violates reasonable assumptions of the type you need to make to do anything at all. I bet that if you had followed some other unusual literal instruction of the teacher on some other day, the teacher would have graded you poorly and said you know what he meant.
(And actually, it's not clear that you can follow the instructions literally. If you follow all the instructions, you have pages full of "do X" and then one sentence at the end which says "don't do X". You have no reason to believe that later instructions should be followed in preference to contradictory earlier ones, so the correct answer would be to tell the teacher that the instructions are contradictory and can't be followed, not to assume that the instruction at the end takes precedence.
And that doesn't even consider that "don't take this assignment" is part of the assignment, so it tells you not to do itself.)
The teacher was a great guy. Stern but dedicated to his craft. The kids in that class were intelligent but weren’t strong students and that’s just as important as being able to teach; which was his entire point. Teachers are responsible for teaching. They aren’t responsible for what you learn. That of course isn’t to say there’s no such thing as a bad teacher, I’ve had several; but not every teacher can be a pedagog. Kids have an obligation to be good students. It isn’t a daycare.
Just as in professions and throughout life, when you’re in the company of those who know more than you, you have an obligation to listen. In sports as a star athlete you have an obligation to be coachable and not a showboating, egotistical hothead. It generalizes throughout life. And by learning the distinction it’s opened a lot of doors I wouldn’t have otherwise wouldn’t have had the opportunity to pass through.
I'm pretty sure that if a coach told an athlete to do a whole bunch of things and at the end said "by the way, ignore all my instructions including this one", and it was not something like a hazing ritual or April Fools Day where having ridiculous instructions was the point, the coach would lose respect, and "the coach knows more than you so you have to listen" wouldn't matter.
In our case it represents a failure to follow instructions.
At any rate, I got the point; even if others didn’t.
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