Because professors are not in a competitive profession, they often do not have a financial incentive to improve their pedagogy. Most professors are incentivized to improve their ability to instruct for non-financial reasons; For duty and the greater good.
If a professor loses their drive for duty and the greater good of the mind, their ability to instruct will diminish. A professor who abdicates their duty to their students has committed the gravest offense against the mastery of teaching.
Instructors who care are angels.
A mentally-strong populous creates a more orderly, less chaotic world. More order makes less violence. If you can communicate with your mind and heart, you’re less likely to pursue your desires with violence. Professors make the world a better place.
Your teacher may be “bad” at teaching because they don’t care, gave up, or the way they communicate makes it difficult for you to assimilate their message–this could be because of mumbling, a thick accent, or other issues.
This post primarily focuses on academic education, like classes in high school, or college; but the content below can apply to any instructor of poor quality.
Below are methods to excel in class when your professor or teacher is bad at teaching.
Make sure you’re still doing all the work and taking all the notes
The first task to remedy a professor possessing poor instructing skills is to ensure you are not the problem. Make sure you are showing up to every class on time, and with focused energy. If you’re staying up too late, you won’t focus in class no matter how good the professor is. If you’re struggling with sleep, ZMA will fix that.
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Make sure you are pursuing your body masteries with equivalent vigor to your mental masteries. If the body domain has not been satisfied, it will distract the mind and weaken the spirit..
If your sleep is good, make sure you are watching the lectures and doing all assignments. If you are not doing your coursework, you are the problem and you will need to fix yourself. Adulthood is realized when you realize no one is solving your problems for you.
You should avoid doing off-path activities until you have exhausted your forward drive on your paths to mastery. You should be ahead on homework because you are working until returns diminish, not stopping when you feel like it or because something is pulling you off the path, like a party.
If you do your tasks the day before they are due your chances of succeeding are slim. Think of a military commander who begins to prepare for war on the eve of battle; he should have prepared months earlier. A successful commander stays many steps ahead, same with successful students.
Strategy is a general concept that can be taught to a wanderer by a single mastery but applied to all other pursuits of mastery.
Each assignment is a graded contest. You are competing in the Mind domain.
Be in command of your life.
Ask the professor for extra help during and after class
Ask a question right away if you are confused. If you are in an online class, do the same thing via email. Too many online students are hesitate to ask questions. If you cannot ask in the moment, ask them after class, or during their office hours.
Professors are paid to teach; make sure you utilize them fully–make them work. Almost all professors have office hours, and if they don’t, you should be able to email them to schedule time to get help. It’s important to ask for help before you need it–meaning, ask early and be ahead.
Ask when you want to know, not when you need to know. If you don’t want to know you may be pursuing the wrong information.
Try to contact your professor a few times. If you put a good faith effort into getting additional help and you’re unable to, you can consider letting someone know. Like a different professor teaching the same subject.
Ask a different professor(or student) for help
If the professor leading your class is unable to help, ask someone else. It is crucial to ask your professor first so they get the first opportunity to help you. To be honorable.
Try asking one of the professor’s peers for help. You might even be able to ask the professor if he has any peers he can recommend you work with. Asking your professor for a peer to help you may illicit motivation as it could be viewed negatively.
You and your professor may have minds that are so different in the way they input and output information that you are incompatible with each other. Regardless if this is true, we still need to learn the material.
If your class has a TA you should ask them for help.
You can also work with other students but be cautious of getting distracted by conversations about the professor if multiple students dislike their instructing style, or any other side-focuses. When dealing with a professor who isn’t teaching satisfactory, sometimes student-groups become compliant/vent-sessions which feel nice, but do not solve the issue.
Use ChatGPT to fill in the gaps
Most colleges say you aren’t allowed to use ChatGPT to do your work, but they do not forbid you using ChatGPT to learn.
ChatGPT can be a helpful tutor, but you need to view it more as a classmate trying to teach you than an assistant professor because ChatGPT often gets information wrong.
We assume this is a temporary condition. For crucial information, you should fact-check it, same with calculations, as at the time of this writing ChatGPT struggles to count. You can ask ChatGPT to check its work which is a good idea.
While listening to a lecture, you can ask questions to ChatGPT for more information. You can also do this while reading which helps fills in the gaps of a textbook.
Find a YouTube professor
If your university professor is not a skilled instructor, consider finding a professor at YouTube University.
Your instructor tells you what you need to know, and you find that information from a superior instructor on YouTube. Students from all around the world, from all disciplines, rely on YouTube professors who uploaded a video about a fringe-subject ten years ago that students rely on today.
This is one of the best aspects of YouTube.
Look at comments to find skilled professors. If there is a mistake in the video, someone will call it out.
Look for videos that have high views, a favorable like/dislike ratio, and comments that confirm the content is accurate. You can bring back YouTube dislikes with this free/safe browser plugin.
Lean on the textbook
This may be the most important entry on this list of dealing with a professor who struggles to profess. A professor may assign you to read just part of a chapter–you can and should read the entire chapter.
Aim to read the entire book in every class. Many classes now provide E-books as a lower-cost alternative, and you don’t usually buy these books, you rent them. So when the class ends, your access to that knowledge ends.
If you write paper notes and you like it, keep doing it. Alternatively you can type your notes into a nottaking application that can act as a second brain and can store your code, something like Upnote, or Joplin, but not Evernote.
Typing your notes into your second brain helps prevent losing knowledge.
Your professor did not write the textbook; a panel of experts did, which that book is then reviewed by other experts. You should try to “100%” every textbook in your class to get the most amount of value from the course, as you’ll likely not return to the textbook once you complete the class.
If your professor tells you to only read sections 1 and 3 out of chapter 1, you should read the entire chapter, and do all the extra practice work. This ensures you are not leaving knowledge on the table. If you wouldn’t leave money on the table in a business deal, you shouldn’t leave knowledge on the table in your mental pursuits.
Important: Try to 100% the textbook for every class you take. Do not leave knowledge on the table.
You cannot correct a bad professor. Work around them. Fight for a superior education. This mentality should be applied to most pursuits.