I've found the debate on handouts fascinating. Recent postings on the way students rely on handouts and their own lecture notes, ignoring wider reading, confirm my own experience. A regular game I have to play now is guessing the source of particularly garbled assertions in student essays. My favourite recently came when a student wrote that the Ancient Greeks sang poems to the accompaniment of a banjo. I just about recognised this as an extremely over-literal interpretation of a facetious remark I'd made in the course of a lecture on the development of lyric poetry. Is the moral not to make jokes in lectures?
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