Martin Dominik

A U Sydney exchange student touted the superiority of “chalk and talk” with no lecture recordings at Penn. Here’s an open secret in academia: chalk and talk is better because it requires a lot of effort on the part of the lecturer, slows instruction to an appropriate rate and forces the lecturer to organise and express their material properly. Simply put, better teaching is sometimes avoided because requires more effort. “What differed was the delivery. My professors wrote everything by hand on a blackboard, working through each problem in real time. At home, lecturers often display pre-typed solutions and narrate over them, which is efficient but, I find, ultimately detrimental to the learning experience. Penn’s lectures weren’t compulsory, but they weren’t recorded either.” smh.com.au/national/i-ve-bee…