Bad Lecturers

We don't want to know that *the rate of infection of Serratia marcescens in your RCH neonatal ward dropped from 32% to 11% (p < 0.001) in June 2004 after infection control using Chlorhexidine Gluconate, two out of three nurses who washed their hands got less G- bacteria in their finger nails, while a patient with Leuconostoc infection presented with fever on the third day of admission - we only want to know what we can learn from them. We only want to know what we could do to help our patients, not the fastidious detail of your glorious studies.

youngyew, 10.59PM, February 27, 2007

So everyone has heard complaints about bad lecturers, but how do we really know whether a lecturer "sucks ass"?

Having just had a suck-ass lecture this morning, I gained a whole new insight in this issue. The lecture was about "Infection Control in Hospital", and the lecturer needs some serious re-education in his presentation skills. As the title said, the lecture was about infections in hospitals, how we could contain them, and the results achievable by some of the common infection control methods. Well, if you think the title sounds boring enough, you are just about getting there. The fact is, it turned out to be much, much worse than what the title promised to be.

So here goes the story. It was 12am 12pm, the lecturer came in and started the lecture, as usual. After some initial setting up, he began mumbling through his slides. Initially it was rather easy-going, because he was basically repeating some of the background knowledge which we had already gone through in the past few weeks.

5 minutes into the lecture, things changed. The quality of the presentation deteriorated into a string of words, so was the our level of alertness. Those who were prone to fishing were slipping into their oblivion, while those who are scared of missing a single word in the lecture were struggling along the slides.

The lecturer was bad.

He basically talked about everything and anything that came to his mind, and his powerpoint presentation was about the same as his speech - incoherent, disorganized, verbose, and dry. Can you imagine how he droned on about 5 different studies about infections in the hospital, and showed us every single detail of the date, time, events of each study as if it really mattered or we really cared? It seemed to me as if he was trying to condense his whole research career into an hour of lecture and can't wait to tell us about every detail of his research studies.

If he had the faintest memory of what a medical student expects, he should have done better, so much better.

The fact is, nobody cares about the details of your study. We hate lecturers who simply cut and paste the results and discussions of their research papers without synthesizing the information. We don't want to know that *the rate of infection of Serratia marcescens in your RCH neonatal ward dropped from 32% to 11% (p < 0.001) in June 2004 after infection control using Chlorhexidine Gluconate, two out of three nurses who washed their hands got less G- bacteria in their finger nails, while a patient with Leuconostoc infection presented with fever on the third day of admission - we only want to know what we can learn from them. We only want to know what we could do to help our patients, not the fastidious detail of your glorious studies. We don't want to listen to you zoom through 70 slides copied from your research paper, and end up with a knowledge constipation. We don't want to listen to lecturers who only spew information indiscriminately instead of instilling knowledge.

If I were to operate a university, I would personally listen to a lecture from a lecturer before I let him / her teach my students. Those who have presentation skill problems or don't care about teaching, should go back to their office and concentrate on their research.


*Note: I made up those details, but the actual content was actually along those lines.