Teaching

I attended an extra mural course in philosophy for a couple of years. The lecturer was Professor Evans of Cardiff University. There were about fifteen people on the course, most of them getting on in years.
The lectures took this form: for the first part (just under an hour) Prof. Evans would dictate slowly to us and we would copy down every word he said. No one asked a question, we just wrote down his words. Then there would be a break for tea or coffee after which followed another session of about three quarters of an hour when questions were asked and a discussion took place.
The format was simple. And it worked.
I tried it on a class of GCSE pupils later on; it worked then too - they all passed.
It seems the sort of thing that an inspector, say, would frown on: "this is not teaching, this is simply dictating and discussing; where's the visual aids? where're the hand-outs?"
I think the secret was that in slowly copying down in one's own handwriting the prof's words, one absorbed them much better than the words of a hand-out. They became one's own words, not others'.
Towards the end of the few years of the course, just before Professor Evans retired, he gave us a few sessions in which he read out to us some chapters of his published book on ethics (?). It was most boring. I could not believe that he could be so boring. He had never been before - why now?
It probably says something about a good teacher: there was a spontaneity about his lectures which did not come across from the well planned material of his book.
As Shaw said: "those who can, do; those who can't, teach." Or maybe "those who can teach, can't do."