LECTURE? I HARDLY KNOW HER! (Oh, man… sorry. Sometimes I just can’t help myself. Anyway…) So over the turkey, my family got to talking about the structure of college classes, and it made me realize that my actual college experience was definitely out of line with my instincts. Basically, if you described a seminar and a lecture to me and asked which one I’d get more out of, I’d guess the seminar; and yet in real reality, most of the courses I loved were lectures. How come? I’m not entirely sure, but here are three partial answers (discerned through a conversation with The Rat):

1. Star Power. Some of those amazing lectures were lecture courses in the first place because the professors were so popular. And they were popular because they were good. I can’t believe I got to take intro to Greek history from Donald Kagan–he’s the man. And I only had that opportunity because he taught a lecture course; if he taught only seminars, only history majors would have been able to take them. Similarly, it’s possible that the Shakespeare courses I took with Harold Bloom were technically listed as seminars, but there were so many of us that really it was just Sit at the Feet of the Master time.

I don’t know why people think that’s bad. If you have Harold Bloom in a room with a bunch of sophomores, do you want to hear the sophomores yapping or do you want to hear Herr Doktor Professor Bloom? Sometimes it’s entirely appropriate to sit back and watch a master at work.

There are teachers who work much better in a seminar setting. I’m not sure whether that talent is actually rarer than the lecturing talent, or whether Yale just prefers talented lecturers to talented seminar-leaders (to the extent that teaching ability factors into Yale’s hiring and especially tenuring decisions at all, which is, as far as I can tell, almost nil), or what. My own guess is that seminars are more difficult to do well, for reasons described below; and so people who can create good seminars are extraordinary, and supercool.

But lectures are an excellent, efficient way to a) teach introductory-level material or b) immerse students in One Man’s Madness for a few hours a week. Both of these are entirely honorable educational strategies; a good college education, I should think, incorporates both.

2. I Didn’t Shave My Legs for This. When lectures go bad, you can basically ignore them and read or write quietly in the back. When seminars go bad, you can hear your brain cells screaming as they die.

Seminars suck because lame people talk in them. Seminars suck because people who haven’t done the reading talk in them. (Mostly, those people were me. I do apologize, and swear to my former classmates that I wouldn’t’ve opened my trap if it hadn’t been part of my grade. You see the problem?) Seminars suck because people refuse to argue, so it devolves into the conversation my friend Sara summarized as, “Oh, you have an opinion, how nice! Oh, you have one too!” Kill. Me. NOW.

I won’t defend anti-argumentativity (…or making up random words because you can’t be bothered to find the right one). And I won’t defend being lame and saying stupid things. But I will defend not doing the reading.

Because I really did learn more outside the classroom than in it. At Yale I was pushed into leadership positions that took up enormous amounts of my time and changed the way I carried myself, the way I related to other people, the way I thought about authority and choice and, really, just about everything. There’s no substitute for the experience of leadership–especially for people like me, who don’t take to it naturally. I was also staying up until three or later every night debating God and the death penalty and the whichness of the why, and trying to figure out the world. I was doing a lot of amazing, life-changing stuff.

What I wasn’t doing, was the reading. Didn’t have time. I did what I had to in the courses that were so difficult I couldn’t skate. (The only course for which I did all the reading on time, in my entire undergraduate career, was Plato’s Metaphysics a.k.a. Who Broke My Brain?! I was the only freshman. I was terrified, little koi among the sharks, and you better believe I was doing the reading. Man, that was a great class! Sort of the reverse of Bloom–I think it was listed as a lecture, but there were only 13 or so of us, and we were all super-dedicated–no “Oh, you have an opinion!”–so it was basically the most wonderful seminar ever. Anyway.) I read before exams, and during break, and so forth. I read things when the courses were over: during the summers, or, in several cases, after I graduated. That was when I finally had the time! …I hope seminar leaders can take some degree of solace in the fact that no matter how pathetically lazy I seemed to be while I was actually enrolled in these classes, I did re-read my notes after college, I eventually did if not all then at least more of the reading, and I learned a lot more than I let on.

I don’t know that this Extracurriculars Uber Alles (“Wait–you mean they have libraries at Yale?”) approach will work for everyone. It worked for me in large part because of a cult–um, scratch that, a debating society–that offered me far more than a semester-long, four-hours-a-week seminar ever could. Which brings me to point #3.

3. Friendship the Matrix of Philosophy. Seminars, even at their very best, are short and full of strangers. They’re generally about understanding and interpreting other people’s ideas as a means to develop your own; this is absolutely necessary, but the focus is still (rightly) on the authors you study rather than on your own beliefs and the consequences those beliefs should have for your life. Seminars, at their very best, are pale imitations of the intense Socratic questioning and existential exploration I got at the dinner table with my friends every night. They could call me to account when my actions didn’t match my professed beliefs. They could provoke me without violating our trust.

Plato’s Metaphysics was so great in part because, out of those 13-ish students, at least 11 of us knew each other from this debating cult. We had a shared vocabulary, a sense of camaraderie, and a shared intensity of purpose. But most seminars don’t have that advantage. They are too often reminiscent of desultory common-room conversation on those first nights at college, when no one knew anyone and everyone was defensive, posturing, or simply uninterested.

So yeah: When seminars work, they’re fantastic; and they certainly approximate the form of philosophical practice better than lectures do! But good lectures are IMO more common than good seminars (proportionally, anyway), and definitely part of a balanced educational breakfast. Don’t be dissin’ the lectures.