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MrDuk
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How to deal with a professor that continuously discounts student questions?

I'm taking a distributed systems course at a well known university in the U.S.

I've noticed my professor has three primary forms of responding to student questions during his lecture:

  • Immediately answers with, just a minute, we're going to cover that
  • Immediately answers with, that's what we just covered
  • Spends a couple sentences briefly explaining why the student's question doesn't apply / doesn't work

Almost no dialog is ever spent on further explanation, but rather on disproving. So, instead of recognizing student questions as a lack of understanding, it seems to come off as defending what he already covered and moving on.

As a student in this course, how best can I approach this? I fear this may be just a personality trait / teaching style that he's acquired, and wouldn't want to offend him with "Your responses to questions are unhelpful." -- But maybe this is the best option?

MrDuk
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