As I reach back into the dark corners of my mind, I vaguely remember something from one of my “How to Be a Teacher in Two Semesters or Less” classes about there being different learning styles and preferences. Some people are audio learners, some visual, others are hands on, and some do best in groups while others are better working alone. Personally, I did reasonably well following the standard college learning model – let’s call it 15 hours of weekly lecture followed by independent study and reading time. In my worst semester, on my worst day, I never had more than four hours of lectures scheduled on any 24 hour period. Even those four hour days were punctuated with breaks, lunch, and assorted other gaps. I would have gouged out my eyes with a #2 pencil if I had needed to sit through 4 hours of uninterrupted talking.

Of all the dry, dull, and occasionally pointless classes you take as part of a major in the humanities, I never recall sitting in any classroom for eight hours at a stretch going blind on hundreds of PowerPoint slides. The reason for that is most likely because it’s a really shitty methodology for almost everyone involved, up to and including the instructor(s). No matter how engaging the material, there’s a very real limit to how much the average human brain is going to absorb in any one sitting. Everything else is runoff, or more diplomatically it’s simply “exposure” rather than actual learning. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with exposure, of course, as long as you admit that’s what you’re doing up front and don’t expect to much return on investment in the end.