>went through 5 years of compsci/cybersec undergrad>most boring useless lecturers ever as professors for every single classI got my degree of course but these two are legit the only two lecturers ive ever seen and heard that dont bore me to death where i can listen to them talk for hours and hours without losing focus at all.
>>23815885Whos the chap on the right
They're better because those lectures are scripted
>>23815935new mfs on /lit/ don't know rick roderick? tf? his lectures aren't really that good by college standards but his folksy style still makes them fun
>>23815959umm ... all college lectures are more or less scripted it's called a lesson plan and a syllabus. i had a professor who would bring like 30 pages of old notes for every lecture of the semester, not that he ever really needed to look at them. op not enjoying his cs lecture is entirely a different issue, an iq issue to be specific. i loved cs lecture been them i'm a geek not some awful bug who took stem classes to get rich.
>>23815970Those Great Courses lectures have teleprompters and shit, it's differernt.
>>23815885The problem is you were in STEM. I was a philosophy and physics double major and every physics prof but one treated teaching like a chore that they had to begrudgingly perform in order to keep their job while every philosophy professor was extremely engaged and enthusiastic about whatever they were teaching.
>>23815973Sugrue, at least, had stated publicly all of his lectures were extemporaneous, other than a very basic written outline.
>>23815973not necessarily, the early ones had a live audience even. the reason if you watch the new ones it looks awkward as the guy looks at different cameras is those allow them to edit out fuckups more easily. the og great courses selected for ability to lecture without saying "umm uhhh" a million times rather than for the professor being good. compare great courses to the oyc lectures. any experienced professor can easily lecture for two hours and stay on track, great courses, even in the 90s where only 45 minutes and now even less. the difference is some of the yale guys go "ummm ahhhh wellll uhh" etc.
>>23815982physics is of course boring because you're just doing mindless math problems on a whiteboard. computer science on the other hand is actually interesting if you have the requisite autism (iq).
>>23815982Most professors in general hate teaching. They all went to grad school because they imagined they’d live some comfy life of reading and occasionally writing or they thought teaching would be just as hoc speaking. It turns out that they spend a lot of time doing bullshit and have to teach plus teaching is a lot of preparation and work. So they all hate it.
>>23815885I don't know about the guy on the right (unless that's Zizek?) but I watched one lecture by the guy on the left and it was immediately clear that he is a total midwit. You'd be better off just reading wikipedia at that point.
>>23816002If they all hate it humanities profs certainly do a better job at pretending they dont lol>>23815991Wasn’t a matter of the content being boring. My only good prof was in statistical thermodynamics which isn’t exactly what comes to mind when you think of interesting physics subjects. The profs just didn’t give a single shit about the quality of their pedagogy and spent most of their lectures incoherently mumbling while they scrawled esoteric formulas onto the chalkboard without explaining anything.
>>23816021Meant to reply to >>23816001 woops
>>23816002I'm an academic in the humanities (not tenured or anything, just a pathetic lecturer), and while I went into academia to read and write, the only thing I enjoy now is the teaching. Everything else involves dealing with other academics (reading their work, writing stuff that they will read, going to conferences and workshops), and humanities academics are pretty much the worst people on earth. Many academics seem to feel the same way.With that said, I still suck at teaching (it's harder than it looks).
The only lecturers who care about teaching in STEM are those assigned to teach first or very rarely second year classesGranted I had a lecturer of real analysis from France who was very good and passionate about teachingI remember I had a Chinese lecturer who really tried to be engaging and interesting but I don't think he succeeded because of the language/culture barrier
>>23816013yeah like i said the early great courses lectures just selected guys who could lecture with any weird vocal ticks more than being particularly good, not to mention cheaper than paying a real rockstar. both of those guys are midwits. the each published one insignificant book to make their professor bones, and then coasted for the rest of their career.
>>23816034how could anyone be passionate about teaching or taking calc 2? they show you the stuff to memorize, you prove you memorized it by taking some exams, the end.
>>23816034you've never watched any of the countless cs classes available from stanford and berkeley? they're all great
>>23816031You only think that because you don’t work with engineering academics, but academics in general terrible. It’s funny. Academics are so insufferable that even academics hate them. Everyone says so. Ask the staff and lower-admin too. They also hate them. They’re just a shitty group of people for some reason. If you actually like to teach you’re probably one of the few good ones. I personally think you have to be fucked in the head to enjoy research and publishing or going to conferences or whatever. I never did become an academic because I dropped out of my program and became a financial coordinator for the department instead, but I always figured if I did then I would eventually go to a liberal arts college to teach exclusively or I would become an admin because life as a researching faculty dealing with other researching faculty would be a nightmare.
>>23816041some of my best professors were in first year math courses, though admittedly there was only so much they could do to make freshman calculus into an engaging subject.
>>23816041Some people just really love teachingThe early courses are all about inspiring students and integrating them into the university At that point most students aren't sure which major they want to select and so that's your best chance to get them interested in a particular field Also because the classes are quite early on, you can waste time with demonstrations and mathematics puzzles/fun factsWhen you get to 3rd or 4th year you just need to follow the script because there's so much material to get through>>23816046Yeah well I didn't go to Stanford nor Berkeley and you're probably not seeing the dud classes
>>23816048a lot of people go into teaching because they are narcissists who like to be in front of a crowd forced to hang on their every word, people go into academia for many reasons, but there is definitely a class of people who grind as shitty adjuncts or take tenure at bottom tier schools just so they can get in front of 30 people to pontificate everyday.
>>23815885Pic related was my favorite even though his courses were the absolute opposite of rigorous and really were just entertaining.>>23816048>I personally think you have to be fucked in the head to enjoy research and publishing or going to conferences or whatever.Academic conferences are 50% CV padding and 50% academics hooking up for short term sex flings.
Rick is awesome. RIP.
>>23816061my buddy’s wife used to be a prof and she told me she loved the three hour lectures because she would “lock the door behind her” and make everyone listen to her thoughts. she taught at a community college
offtopic. take your depressive whining to /adv/
>>23817143retard
>>23815965People associate him with Mark Fisher which is why I don’t really care for him
>>23816034My experience has been the complete opposite. The most passionate professors are the ones giving courses to senior undergrads or postgraduate students. This is where they get to teach things more closely related to their fields of interest. They're often still bitter and unpleasant, but they care more about the subject than calculus or thermodynamics professors.
