Where the Student-Teacher Ratio is 300-1

According to a story in the New York Times, MIT, Harvard, and a number of other prestigious schools in the United States are doing away with the introductory math and science lecture classes in which more than 250 freshmen reside. As a student at Princeton, I must confess how sorry I am that Old Nassau has no such designs on our mega-classes. Some find it refreshing to be part of a class where your name doesn’t matter. Being up in the risers, surrounded by your whole college class, I guess it makes you feel more like you’re at a football game than a lecture. To me, it’s more like a Greek tragedy, only I’m part of some mute chorus the people up on the stage will never listen to. I do have some experience: this semester, I took ECO 100: Introduction to Microeconomics (population: 310). My professor, equipped with an industrial grade laser pointer, certainly seemed to enjoy the spotlight; at least, his profuse garrulousness meant he rarely finished his own lectures. His audience seemed to be getting smaller and smaller as the performance’s “run” came to an end, though. I guess when no one knows who you are they don’t miss you much. This is the real problem with large, lecture-based classes: a small subset of the students, probably people already informed about the subject, follow the professor through all his poorly-proofread slides. The rest of us teach ourselves as best we can come exam-time. Speaking of which, I have to go study…

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/us/13physics.html?em