My opinions of a good lecturer II

Haha, a good lecturer doesn’t need a PhD lah... Just don't understand that why the Engineering Department in NUS wants those full time lecturers to have at least a PhD degree... The Arts and Social Science, Business and Law faculty have many lecturers without PhDs. Good lecturers can change opinions of students about a subject even those the students may hate it at first. If you have a fun Maths teacher that teaches Normal technical students, most of the student’s grades will definitely improve from D to C or even A. If you have a lousy and boring teacher that only crunches numbers after numbers on the backboard without explaining properly most students will not be interested and only the very best students will score As. Lecturers with PhDs are proven good researchers but are they proven good lecturers??? Its up to the students to decide who’s good and who’s not. Actually I myself is not easily impressed by most lecturers and even pastors in thhe church. Those lecturers I like, definately have some qualities which wins me over and eager to attend his lecture.

Maybe NUS focus more on research than teaching, because research and innovation sells and makes money for NUS. But there are also a lot of meaningless research projects I know of that definitely won’t sell, like some repackaged or derivations of known equations for some phenomena. Some models do describe a process quite accurately, so it still has some meanings. Actually I find research rather interesting and I am rather curious about what researcher do, and I can learn many skills like literature review, methodology, chemical and separation process, report writing and presentation skills.   Although successful research projects for drugs and useful materials make money for NUS in the short term, lousy lecturers many be detrimental to the society in the long term. Lousy and boring lecturers will produce unmotivated students with disinterest in his subject unless he already have a strong background knowledge on that subject. There will be many students who get borderline or fail grades under a lousy lecturer or teacher (unless there is moderation by the lecturers and admin themselves) and they fail to impart useful knowledge to the students and they will forget about the subject once the exam is over. I strong feel that NUS should invest more on training lecturers and teachers presentation skills. They are already well trained in research, but many of them I feel are not well trained to be an interesting lecturer.

It’s unfortunate that most lecturers never take teaching course in how to be a good lecturer. Some basic subjects in Chemical Engineering like Thermodynamics, Seperation Processes or Engineering Principles don't need lecturers with PhDs to teach. A good lecturer should be passionate about his subject area, is clear about what to teach, good presentation skills, good sense of humour and uses real life scenarios to relate to what he teach. He has to speak reasonably good English or any other languages, use intonations appropriately and use some gesture to prove his point. If he can explain something abstract to me until a blur bum like me is convinced then he can be considered a good lecturer (and marketer haha). If the lectures can fulfill all these criteria then he can score an A in teaching and even get a teaching award.

In fact, I know of a few lecturers with Masters or even just Honours degree (honours cannot teach in NUS lah) that are quite good. I remembered that in my junior college I used to have a funny Maths lecturer called Mr Foo that looks sotong but he looks cute when he shows the solutions of some summation equations and also the hypothesis theory about reject of not to reject a value. Ms Cornie Chung is a relatively good lecturer also, she is good in using her body language, and she explains things like game theory, supply and demand, customer’s mentality, elasticity of customers to prices in a layman language. She convinced me that most decisions we make are based on economics. Mr Pang Nai Ho has Masters degree in Engineering and he teaches petroleum refining part time and tell some stories about his wife, the stock market, fortune and feng shui telling. He teaches about the units and processes inside those petroleum refining plants. He said that according to a feng shui master, he said that this year is a male rat year and it will favour Hillary Clinton to be a president. He said that is year is not good for the oxen though. He also said that whenever he comes to NUS to teach, the STI will fall, but luckily he had sold most of his stocks except for those he used his CPF to buy.

Although I don’t know Adam Khoo personally, but he had an interesting background. He used to be an unmotivated bum like me but he went to a top college after his O Levels and went on to get first class honours in Business. He is one of those underachievers who turn into a successful businessman and lecturer. He gives lectures at $1000 an hour which is more than the highest paid NUS lecturer. He has the ability to motivate lazy bums and underachieving students so that so that they found new directions in life. He teaches the right strategy of learning to improve memory. He also teaches ways about how be invest our way to become a millionaire on the stock market and the internet. He is not some boring lecturers I encountered in NUS; he is rather good in presenting and has a good sense of humour. He uses a lot of diagrams, mind maps and graphics in his presentations. That’s why schools are willing to pay him $1000 per hour or lecture lah.