Enormous classes enormously unpleasing

Enormous classes, often known as “gen eds,” aren’t enormously pleasant or always conductive to learning.

How often do you see, let alone mingle with, thousands of people?  After all, the student population of some schools are 25,000 or more!

This semester, I’ve stood at the head of my core math course (College Algebra, ick!) and wondered how any of my students can learn anything in such an extensively large classroom?  How can I ensure that I am recovering material that needs to be recovered and move past material that most of the student body understands?  My core math course is so large it feels like I’m standing in the field of Wrigley Field.

Surely, learning in any large lecture hall is no easy task either.  In small classes you are more of an individual I can work with as a small group or one on one.  You will probably be addressed by name, not by student ID number.  You’ll also be more readily heard and so your specific issues can be addressed so you can learn better.  After all, I am a guide to be used to find knowledge, not a bank for you to withdraw information and deposit in your mind.

However, in large classes, you’re reduced to a number within a vast pool of numbers.  Rarely, if ever, are individual students called upon or even known to their professors.  Generally speaking, issues brought up by students have to be proceeded by their ID number so we can look them up in our grade books. (I still use an old fashioned book, not excel or blackboard or anything like that.)  The outcome being that the objective of the class (teaching the student how to find the information and use the information once found) is muddled with more distractions than you can count.

What happened to the small class sizes?  My favorite classes were Number Theory, Linear Algebra, Calculus III, etc where my class sizes were 17 or less and I started working relationships with my professors on a more personal and professional level and less as a minion being force fed data to regurgitate on command for some exam.

So the question arose:

Can one learn in an environment where you are sandwiched between hundreds of your peers?  Can success occur in lecture halls?

Assuming of course you don’t attend more then 1 hour a week of professor office hours for clarifications and to actually learn what you could not in lecture hall.  I’m talking about students (99.9% it seems) who never go to office hours and just cruise through the lecture hall.

My College Algebra Class (MATH 130) has 217 registered students.  I have 3 assistants that help me grade, that’s all they do.  Yea, there’s a recitation for everyone once a week, but still.  I don’t know nearly 5% of the class! (And I highly doubt all 217 show up on any given day.)