Has anyone ever complained about a lecturer?

glider3560

jbreckmckye wrote: »

I would tend to say the lectures are a means of administering a reading list. They're an opportunity for those acquainted with the critical milieu to illustrate research options for the week paper / dissertation. Undergraduates cannot make those decisions, because they simply aren't familiar with recent events in research.

I don't expect a first year to guess which directions to take when dealing with the corpus of papers from the last thirty or forty years. I imagine it may be easier in the sciences (there are certain things to simply 'learn'), but in my own field (literature) that's just not possible.

I believe in the sciences (my area) that lectures are used as a way of teaching. There are plenty of very complex processes that the typical undergraduate wouldn't be able to grasp by simply reading the literature.

The people who teach us are the people who make the discoveries they are teaching us, so they can teach us about the experimental procedures they've done and also tell us about things that haven't worked - to help us out with our own research later on.

Where we are being taught something very new, or something with conflicting views, my lecturers will often tell us not to read about this in the literature (unless we are doing a piece of research or a literature review) as many of the things can turn out to be false in a short amount of time (i.e. before the exam), which simply complicates matters.

I do agree with others here, that maths can be taught from a textbook. However, I would expect more from a maths lecture than just being told to read a book. I would expect to be shown some examples, that you can actually follow. This lecturer is simply unable to go through examples in the correct order (or even missing steps at times), which makes it impossible to understand.

I've decided not to complain. I've read the complaints procedure for this department and TBH it looks quite complex. I'll spend my time doing my own research/talking to my tutor.

glider3560

The_One_Who wrote: »

There are research-only positions which will involve very, very little teaching, if any, but I don't think these are paid quite as well as the lectureship grades.

The lecturer in question is only a researcher, who is new to the university this year. All her lecturing is done on a paid by the hour basis - i.e. she isn't a "proper" lecturer and there is nothing about teaching in her job title, it is a side-line that she does (presumably for the £25-ish per hour they pay her).

babyboom_2

Voyager2002 wrote: »

At university, YOU are responsible for your own learning. Since you have a helpful and competent tutor, ask for more book recommendations: there are any number of books on mathematical methods for scientists, and if the books recommended are not helpful, with guidance you can always find others that fit the bill.

Complaining would only lead to bad feeling -- lecturers have far better things to do than teaching, and this person's career depends on research performance rather than keeping a bunch of students happy.

That makes sense too. It's our responsibility as students to do our own thing, sometimes students forget all about this.

Indie_Kid

Voyager2002 wrote: »

At university, YOU are responsible for your own learning. Since you have a helpful and competent tutor, ask for more book recommendations: there are any number of books on mathematical methods for scientists, and if the books recommended are not helpful, with guidance you can always find others that fit the bill.

I agree. I was struggling (still am) with programming and the book that was recommended wasn't (imo) that good. I was talking to my head of programme who recommended a better one.

glider3560

Well, some good news from today. Received an email from the departmental office stating that they will allow us to take a single sheet of notes into the exam. Not sure what brought this on, but this is great news and should make this unit much easier.