In a way, this speaks to a sort of complex truth embedded in the common assumption that professors just walk into a classroom and start spewing out their intrinsic erudition. I can produce a lecture in part because of all the things I know which my students do not yet know; to try in one gulp to transfer all the things I know about a particular specific topic through writing, to externalize all the things I know, would be very hard.

There’s also a question of the value of repetition, and of the mnemonic value of listening to a lecture and taking notes. I know I’ve always learned best by reading and noting things from my reading, but that is not the only learning style out there in the world. I’ve definitely known people who simply can’t retain things from reading, who have to hear it, write notes on it. When I first start teaching at Swarthmore, even in my surveys, I largely avoided lecture, and I had a definite constituency of students pretty much beg me for more lectures when I did my course evaluations. I don’t think that was just Pavlovian on their part: it reallys reflected the fact that this was the way they learned best.

Prof. Burke’s self-critique probably needs to be put in proper perspective: his students are in awe of his lecturing and his teaching in general. They literally take on a reverent tone when talking about his classes. I know for a fact that his teaching generates thoughtful discussion; I’ve had the pleasure of listening to two students recount a Burke course around the dinner table months after the fact (compete with standup impersonations of classroom characters). The enthusiasm was palpable. He apparently has a knack of getting students to think, which is what teaching is all about in my book.

From the reports I get, he’s the kind of professor (like a Don Gifford) who students will remember decades later. Prof. Burke’s influence even extends hundreds of miles away as the word “trope” has now become a fixture in our family’s vernacular!

Lecturing is not teaching. Longer argument here.

The only (small) issue I noticed, looking at my notes, was in the first “Africa in trouble” section, you brought up quite a few Southern African-specific statistics, and then moved into the much broader second category, That said, I didn’t really notice the issue in class, putting the lecture worlds ahead some lectures I’ve had at Swat so far.

Do you think you were maybe too hung up on flow? I always try to get what I am doing to flow nicely and all make sense. Sometimes it does. Sometimes I realize it does not as I am going along and in the panic of the moment come up with a good (or at least plausible) way to fix it. That makes me feel smart. Of course nowadays I usually post an outline at the start of class so there is less room for that.
Sometime even by design however I up and tell that that A and B are not going to fit together, or that the significance of something I am talking about now will not be fully explained until later. I need to sort of stop and point out to them that this is a lecture not a high-wire act. I have never actually stopped halfway through and told them that the lecture seemed to be turning into a train wreck, but I suppose it would work. I actually like pointing out what the different parts of a lecture are supposed to do, as students are not likely to see a lecture as an artifact unless encouraged to do so. YMMV.

I was a TA for an ancient history class full of freshmen in 1997 and I remember in section I was attempting to use the (first, now) Gulf War as an metaphor for something or other, and suddenly I noticed all the blank stares and realized I might as well have been talking about the Spanish-American War. It made me feel pretty old — and I was 23!