Are Your Lecture Materials Junks or Resources?

If you are a student, lecture materials are indispensable parts of the tools for success in school. It helps you deepen your knowledge of any subject you are taught in school. You can equally use it as revision material for your exams. However, I have seen lecture materials that are near worthless and some that are so much treasure that I had to preserve it. On Student Groove this week, I want to show you what makes a lecture material junk and how to become unstoppable by junk lecture materials.  

Meet Your Lecture Materials

Lecture materials are not just any pieces of paper presented to you by your lecturer. They are supposed to be a compressive content for your course contents. They are not used years in year out, they are updated regularly.

They are not a replacement for your textbooks, but they are good enough to give you the key knowledge that can enable you to dive deeper and broader in the study of any subject matter of your choice.

Some lecturers choose to make notes from different texts books and string them into easy to read style. Some others prefer to make copies of textbook chapters and web pages that will give you requite knowledge on the course at your level.

In some cases, lecturers insist that their texts book on the course serves the lecture material for their course. In many cases, such insistence is selfishly motivated.

Whichever style your lecturer chooses to generate his lecture material for you, the important thing is that it should be sound, relevant and well presented for easy understanding and avail you the knowledge you didn’t have before coming to that level.

Unfortunately, that’s not what we find in many cases. I have seen lecturer materials which are nothing more than…

Junk Lecture Materials

The earliest I saw was a lecturer who spent his lecture times dictating notes which most of my classmates believe was download from a website.

Somebody actually wrote the link to download the man’s notes on the board one day.

Aside from the fact that he NEVER teaches, the extra talking he does aside repeating areas we didn’t hear clearly, his lectures lack substance. Very shallow fellow!

Another of its kind was when a lecturer gave us a material that was copied from Wikipedia and she didn’t even make an effort to clean it and give it a semblance of originality.

I am not saying that Wikipedia materials are bad, but you and I know that most lecturers will severally penalize you if you get your reference from there. Yet, a lecturer copied Wikipedia page and served us as lecture material.

I have seen supposed lecture materials, handouts and texts books that are for sales which aside from being copied, were riddled with all manner of errors.

They were rushed out of the press to make money from you not to improve your life with the sound knowledge that will make you a true professional.

I am not the Minister of Education, your Rector or Vice-Chancellor, so I can’t regulate how your lecturers teach you. But I can show you how to become unstoppable by junk materials.

First, you need to know that you are…

Not in School for Grades

Grades are just supposed to be a testament that you really came to school. They are not the goal.  Nobody hires you for your grades; they no dey chop am. You are hired for what your grades suggest you can do!

I am not disputing the fact that your grade matters; my point is that it’s inferior to who you become in the course of your study in school.

Of what value are you, as a computer science graduate who can’t write a line of code, an accountant that can balance account or a mass communication graduate that can’t write a proper new story?

When you don’t have as much professional sense as your grades suggest, the grade on your certificate will only tell the world that you are a fake.

It will bring you shame and embarrassment. The euphoria of your good grades will diffuse completely when the doors of jobs are shut against you despite your big grades.

Having known this, your focus should be not just how to get an A by buying a handout or textbook; but how to truly become what you went to school to be. Getting an A should be the byproduct of proper learning!

The fact is that your becoming a good accountant is not squarely on the school, you have a role to play while they have theirs. When they decide not to play their own role by giving you junk material, will you also hate your future so much to be relaxed with the trash they dish out as lecture material?

So, instead of being content with finishing the little piece of information they gave you, use their junk materials as…

Guide for Deeper Study

Don’t be comfortable with mastering the little information they strung together for you. Use their material for deeper study on your course contents.

Use the topics in his lecture materials to study your course contents deeper that he taught. There is hardly anything a lecturer is teaching that is from his head. He read it from somewhere!

He is paid to research into different materials to come up with a compressive material for you; but when he fails to do that, help your life by doing the research by yourself.

Go online and download the key textbooks on your course. In engineering there is a book called Taraga, in Biochemistry, there is a book called Leghniger. There is hardly anything anybody will be teaching in those courses that are not contained in these textbooks.

Find out the one that concerns your course of study and get them. If they are not available for download on pdfdrive.net, go to the market and buy a copy. Forget about fine shows and human hairs and build yourself up first!

In some courses like mass communication, you may not have one textbook that has everything you need to study in your course in one textbook. Well, I saw such a book written by an Indian but it’s not as in-depth as getting major textbooks on the different aspects of your study like Radio Production, Features Writing, Public Relations etc.

In addition to what you are reading from such well-researched textbooks, you can equally get videos for more. If you can make arrangement for internship for yourself during holidays, please do. It’s your life and that of your family!

Your lazy lecturer will not be jailed for giving outdated, irrelevant information in your field. It’s your career that will be in jeopardy if you don’t do anything to make up for the junk lecture materials you get.

A caveat: If you have a Copy-and-Paste-Lecturer, be careful to reproduce what he gave you in his notes or textbook and keep your deeper knowledge for real world.

My Point?

You are not in school to stay for some years and get out. You are there to learn and develop the capacity to solve certain problems for humanity. This is possible through lecturers, lecture materials, assignments and projects you are given.

When your lecturer decides to give you junk as lecture materials, forgive him; but don’t frustrate your future by being comfortable with it. Dig deeper on anything he gives you; it’s may not show in your grades, but it will show in real life!

PS: For more insight I share with students, follow @StudentGroove on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram. You can read my past and future Student Groove Blog posts on Wednesday on brojid.com or Join my WhatsApp broadcast through 08105504664.