It was my senior year of college and most of my classes were Anthropology related. I got lucky that my college turned Anthropology into a new major that year. I had almost enough classes from the Sociology department that overlapped into the new major that I could graduate with a double major. I only had to get through a few Anthropological Theory classes and had to take a few Spanish classes to achieve this goal.

Anthropological Theory sounded interesting but ended up being the worst class I've ever taken. On the first day of class my professor announced that after the second week of classes, he would no longer be lecturing. Instead, each class session two students would give presentations on a chapter of our textbook. One person would give a 40 minute presentation and the second would give a 10 minute recap to cover anything the first person missed.

Basically, our professor expected inexperienced undergraduates to teach their peers. He lectured on the first few days of class and then never lectured again. The thing about undergraduate students is most have never had to give more than a five minute presentation in classes...especially undergraduate Sociology students. Because of their lack of experience, undergrad students are horrible teachers. This one class was an absolute disaster from the start.

When it was time for the presentations to begin, the first presenter lasted 5 minutes. Getting up in front of a class to give a 40 minute presentation is hard when you've never done so before. The poor guy was nervous and ran through his material fast. The second person who was doing the recap portion also ran through their material. Those of us in the audience were expected to take notes because we were going to be tested over the theories we learned....we didn't learn anything that day.

We didn't learn anything the next class either. Pretty much the entire first half of the semester no one made their presentations longer than 10 minutes. Every student in that class hated being there. The first exam was horrible. He didn't give us a study guide and since no student taught much we were expected to read the textbook and muddle through things ourselves. It's the first time I ever left school angry because my time was wasted every single class period.

Groups of students in the class went to the department head to complain about how horrible it was and how unfair it was. Our professor got mad about the complaints and basically yelled as us for not making it to 40 minutes with the presentations. Before and after class you could hear students talking about how much they hated the class.

So did anyone make it 40 minutes?

The day our professor yelled at us, he had made it clear he was ready to start failing people. By scaring the hell out of those of us who hadn't presented he had lit a fire. I was one of the first students to make it slightly over 40 minutes long.

To prepare I did the only thing I knew how to do...I wrote a paper. I wrote a 10 page paper over the topic I was presenting on. What was my topic? I have absolutely no memory. I wrote the paper, read my paper super slowly to get me to the 40 minute mark, and immediately forgot everything. I had never given a presentation like that before. I was so freaked out the days leading up to the presentation that my social anxiety kicked into high gear and my only thoughts were getting through it without embarrassing myself.

After my presentation the others who needed to present asked me how I figured out how to make it to 40 minutes and I told them a 10 page paper read a little at a time will get them there. Everyone copied my tactic and others started making it 40 minutes. Every person read from a piece of paper. There was no eye contact with the audience. It was just a bunch of people doing what they needed to do to get through a class with no care that the audience learned anything.

It was horrible. The second test for the semester was as horrible as the first. No one knew what to study. No one knew what to take notes on. There were lots of low grades and the professor was forced to offer extra credit to get the grades where they needed to be.

So many students complained that semester that the professor refused to ever teach the class again. When I became a graduate student in the Sociology department the next year some of the other grad students said the class was such a disaster our professor went through a bad depression because students hated it so much.

Moral To The Story:

Never have students teach themselves or their peers for an entire semester. Student presentations are useful, but you shouldn't only use that teaching tactic for an entire class. If you as a professor expect your students to do your job, the students will fail miserably. Undergraduate students lack the experience to be teachers.

I didn't learn a thing that semester. I wasted good money paying for a class that was useless. I paid for students to teach me and our professor to sit in the back of class and watch us. It was a lazy way of teaching and he ruined what could have been a great class by refusing to teach us himself.

Whats the worst class you've ever taken?

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