Images of Professors

Last night I finished Dan Brown's latest book, The Lost Symbol. I know, I'm lame. Sometimes the writing was so bad I almost quit reading. But then I would remember that I spent $23 on it and that when I sell it to the used book store I'll probably only get 7 bucks for it, and then kept reading just for economic reasons. But I digress.

The worst part of the book was Brown's description of Robert Langdon teaching a class at Harvard. First of all, it was a class on symbology, and 500 students were in the class. That alone is ridiculous. I doubt Harvard has any 500-student classes but if they do it certainly wouldn't be in symbology. Beyond that, the description of Langdon's lecture and his students' responses was embarrassingly awful. No students speak or react the way those students do. But what I find really disturbing is that REAL students read descriptions like this and they think that's the way their classes should be. Langdon makes a big deal about the fact that he is entertaining his students. He purposely leads them in different directions so that he can leave them speechless at the end of the lecture. He's not teaching them--he's giving them useless and esoteric trivia. I can't teach like Robert Langdon, and I don't want to teach like Robert Langdon. But sure enough, one of my students this semester told me he wanted my lectures to be "riveting."

Thanks a lot Robert Langdon. I hope Tom Hanks keeps playing you in the movies because he isn't really riveting either.