summarizing essay

The Difference Between Lecture And Discussion System
In his article,” Is Anybody Listening,” David Daniels explains that the educational lecture system is inefficient though it is profitable. Although students try to write down some notes, they can not pay attention to professor’s featureless and slow speech. Moreover, many students will not go to the class if the professor seldom takes attendance. Without doubt, students can not absorb any knowledge by memorizing few notes on final exam and then they easily fail the course. Both teachers and students do not do their job well no matter on teaching or studying. Therefore, the best way to solve the problem is divide students into several small groups to cultivate them thinking independently. By sharing their own ideas and releasing experiments, students can think much deeper and learn much more. However, smaller classes do not commonly used in the colleges though it is extremely beneficial to students. Therefore, I started to know that discussion system broaden my horizons since I entered the university.
Take me for example. When I first entered the college Michael told us that we had to prepare one interesting topic, showing and telling it to your group members. At the beginning, I felt nervous and unwilling to talk to them or even share my innermost idea with them, but Michael forced me to do it and then he would ask some questions to let me think the cause, effect and feedback toward one issue. Although I was trembling to share my topic to everyone, I found that I could learn a lot from others’ opinions in a small group. Moreover, by interacting with students, Michael could easily understand our problems and gave us an appropriate analysis. As a consequence, both teacher and student can be benefited from the small class.
In contrast, many schools in Taiwan use lecture system. Take my previous school life for instance, I always felt sleepy and just wrote down the notes on the blackboard without pondering when the teacher used a lazy tone in the class. Therefore, I needed to use extra time to absorb what I wrote in the text book and I got half the result with twice the effort. Furthermore, I was afraid of asking questions when teacher was giving a speech, for fearing that I would interrupt other people. My classmates and I would impossibly talk about our thoughts in the class but scribbled the answer which teacher gave on the book. Honestly, I had never thought that I must deliberate upon the positive and negative sides toward each question in the lecture system.
A few years ago, I had heard a report talked about the difference between foreign students and Chinese students on educational attitudes. Foreign countries are concentrate on letting their children ask questions when they are still young. They must know the origin of the formula when they write the equation and think over the Newton’s three laws. On the contrary, Chinese teachers just emphasize that their students must write down the correct answer instantly. Consequently, foreign students always get several medals in the Olympic due to the fact that they can ponder the issue again and again. And this is the problem that Chinese must take them as a model toward the educational system.
Although many experts claim that school using smaller group to let each pupil can release their comments; however, the teachers have to pay much more efforts to teach their students. Hence, the lecture system still exist not only because it origins from hundreds years ago but also economically necessary. If the government didn’t change the educational policy, the ineffective system would keep influencing students.