EWOT Goggles #4 - "Is class participation good or bad? (Economically speaking)" (10/02/2011)

          Okay this week I won't make my EWOT that long since I will try to explain my observation as short as I can. I have observe something since I got to college in the United States. I take four classes this semester and all of them are above 100 students. This means that every class I am in takes place in auditrious or big room where 150 students might seat. My longest class is just 1 hour and 10 minutes but the other 3 are 50 minute lectures. It was hard for me to picture the idea that you do not have your 20 person class like in high school or college in Mexico where you can ask a lot of things to the professor and its okay. Moreover the classes are shorter so information comes faster. Now when I was young I was always told that participation is encourage and is good for not only you but the class as a whole since another student might have the question. I truly support Adam Smith in the idea that self-interested people are guided bu these invisible hand that ends up helping the community but in this scenario I'll have to go with Darwin. Now that I am in college I have seen participation as something not good (economically speaking). I had a math lecture this past week which talk about limits. There is a student in my class that sits in the front row and always ask things that make the professor stop and try to re explain. Last class I counted exactly 10 minutes of the class wasted on trying to fully explain this question. Now I have made calculations. Tuition is $40,000 thousand dollars per year which means is $20,000 USD per semester and if you divide that by four classes, which is the average, you pay $5,000 USD per class. Now imagine you have the class for 16 weeks which is 4 months you will pay $312.50 USD per week of that class. I take my math class twice per week so $156.25 is the value of every lecture. So I am basically paying $1.42 for every minute in that lecture and by that question I lost almost $15 USD. In the long run if this happens once a week by adding students participatiion or so you could be loosing more than $200 USD which were not targeted for you since you understood better. My conclusion is that participation in lecture is actually economically speaking bad for students. Questions should be ask in office hours or to the TA's in recitations. I might making a wrong assumption? Or am I not considering other factors?
This has been my personal observation of the economical view of participation in lectures....