I did all of the work for week 9 on the 27th. This was not as hard as you'd think. Week 9's lectures are much more repetitious than I would wish. (Only five pages of notes for a whole week of lectures?)
We're supposed to be able to speed up the video, so it plays faster, but that doesn't seem to work for me. I could try a different browser, and see if it works there.....
In any case, I am now NOT BEHIND for the first time in weeks and weeks! (Well, if you ignore the fact that I haven't taken the third quiz yet, I'm not behind.... "I am caught up on listening to lectures and doing exercises." -- that is a true statement.)
Week 10 is THIS WEEK. Yay.
The contrast between the two people teaching this class is stark.
One of them has clearly taught this material MANY times, and has devoted considerable time and energy to refining his presentation. He does a good job of covering what he means to cover, with enough-repetition-but-not-too-much, and his exercises give students a chance to make sure they understand the material (appropriate difficulty for what was taught, without excessive obfuscation).
In contrast, it's not clear that the other has ever taught it. He seems completely familiar with the material, but the teaching veers between "stultifyingly repetitious" and "way too fast" (barely touching on important points). I mean -- if you are about to launch into (at least) two weeks of lectures about various fallacies, don't you think it would be nice to define what "fallacy" means? I was clear that there was something wrong, if something was a fallacy, but I did not know what the definition is, in this context........ I still have no idea what *he* thinks it means; I got my definitions off the web......
The video quality is, likewise, excellent in one case, and barely acceptable in the other (lighting so bad you can't see his eyes at all? looming over the camera [and so, the viewer] like the Great and Terrible Oz? No. Really. Just ... no. Did ANYONE look at these lectures, before they were published? Baffling....).
Wouldn't you think that an experienced professor who does a very good job (at teaching, and at teaching-on-video), working with ... someone else ... would help their partner-teacher do a good job?
I would expect it.... I mean -- I know that could be touchy, especially as we are not talking tweaks, here, we are talking MAJOR revision, but good grief.
The one looks much worse, interspersed with the other..................
And vice versa. Hmm. One doesn't want to conclude that's a reason for not helping the teacher-partner, but one does wonder..........
At least the feedback for the exercises I did yesterday gave the right answer, even if I gave an incorrect answer. Before, with this teacher, you might have to take the exercises over and over, until you gave no wrong answers, in order to find out what he thought all the right answers were.
This more-complete feedback speeds up the exercise-taking to an acceptable amount of time spent. A definite improvement.
It is clear to me that college teaching will move in the direction of "lectures in this on-line format." Only the very best instructors will be doing this sort of teaching. I am puzzled that people would put mediocre (at best) presentations of content out there on the web, for absolutely anyone to peruse. It doesn't do their reputations any good, and it can't be good for the reputation of the institutions that actually pay them to teach, either.......... Odd.
I wrote all of the above, yesterday morning, and then I listened to the first lecture in week 10.
I think lecture 10-1 is going to be the straw that breaks my back for this course.
He spent 15 minutes talking about what he contends are three different sorts of ad hominem arguments. He made the point that sometimes ad hominem arguments are justified.
He never defined two of the sorts of ad hominem arguments until the feedback for the exercises. Not in the lecture. Not in the exercises themselves. In the feedback.
The last lecture from week 8 is about utility (overall expected value). The utility of spending time trying to figure out the difference between a dismisser ad hominem argument and a denier ad hominem argument is nil, as near as I can figure. I understand why we care what an ad hominem argument is, and I understand why we care if that ad hominem argument is justified or not, but really, taking categorization of fallacies to this level of granularity? Who cares.
At the beginning of the class, we learned about the skeptical regress. Every premise is the conclusion of a previous argument, which means -- in order to prove anything, you have to first prove its premises, and all of their premises, etc., etc., etc., back to the beginning of everything, which doesn't exist..........
I was talking about this with my better half yesterday, and he said "The Axioms! In math, everything stems from the Axioms!" Alas, this is philosophy, rather than math, and I suspect the only Axiom in philosophy is that there ARE no Axioms............
Anyway -- like the skeptical regress, this "categorizing down to finer and finer granularity" could also go on forever. We could take ad hominem deniers, and deny because of clothing choices, accent, gender, ethnicity..... Then we could deny because of this accent, that accent, some other accent........ It could go on and on, just like the skeptical regress could go on and on, as we gave new names to all of the narrower and narrower categories...........
Whatever. Enough is enough. This class is too weird. Partly interesting and informative, partly obscure and obtuse and way too much noise-to-signal. I'm done trying to pick the signal out of the noise.
If the good teacher teaches more of the class, I'll listen to him, but I'm done spending time listening to the other. I haven't take quiz 3, and can't see any point in taking it if I'm not taking the final quiz. (The lectures for weeks 11 and 12 are not available now; I can't tell who is going to teach them.)
I misunderstood the description of this class. I thought it was going to be much more practical than it is.
If one single change is made before the class is offered again, I vote for changing the class description to make it very clear how much of the class is "Should you bet your last $100,000?" and how much is "picking the definitions for dismissers and deniers out of the feedback from the exercises."
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