(Because nothing brings in readers like a physics pedagogy post...)

Out in Minnesota, Arjendu is expressing high-level confusion about the business of lecturing:

As I've said a few times before in this blog, I prefer to let students read the text to get a preliminary take on physics content on their own, generate questions and confusions on which I focus during 'lecture', and then check their comprehension of these principles by working together on applying them via problem-solving -- and doing this in my presence so I can help them work out what they do and don't know.

I see this as directing the class's and my energy at the biggest road-blocks to mastery. The traditional method of (i) presenting a lecture in class, (ii) asking students to respond to the lecture presentation with questions, and then (iii) go home to work on problems, seems to me to be quite inefficient.

I tend to come down more on the side of traditional lectures, myself-- I teach the intro classes off PowerPoint (using the tablet PC to scribble in additional notes), but I'm definitely aware of the issues he raises (which are also the basis of the Just-In-Time Teaching method). The stuff that I think students will find confusing is not necessarily the stuff that really ends up confusing them, and from year to year, they manage to be baffled by things that I think ought to be easy.

I end up doing primarily lecture for a few reasons, none of them particularly grounded in deep principle: