Prof. Anonymous, you describe the challenge of teaching to today’s college students vividly and eloquently. I felt like I was there in the classroom, hearing the clackety-clack.
I think you make a good point that the traditional college-teaching paradigm, in which the undergraduate professor’s job is to distill and comment on the material in a thick, dense textbook, is dead.
(Perhaps similar to the very early days of television news, when news producers realized that newspeople couldn’t just read the news on the air the way they had done on radio. That couldn’t hold people’s attention on television, even though it did on radio.)
In my very humble opinion (because I’m not a professor and it’s easier said than done), you need to redesign the course to make it more like a graduate course.
The students should have to create something new rather than take notes on your spoken lecture.
You are boiling down a chapter for young people who boil down information all day long.
They should be producing the 30-40 PowerPoint slides, not you.
For example, the students could have to pick a modern-day issue and describe what Madison would say about it, and who today is taking a Madisonian stance on that issue and who isn’t.
Let their surfing and typing be all about them having to distill the concepts of the course into original products.
Across all disciplines the standard undergraduate course is a text and readings, PowerPoint-based lectures, and some term papers or tests. I think you describe well that we’re seeing the demise of that design.
