First, I would like to play devil's advocate for the lecturer. Any class that requires prior knowledge will be slowed by people asking about the prior knowledge. The diligent students of a class can be held back by too many "dumb" questions. Pre-read the lecture topic from your textbook before the lecture. The lecture is intended to fill in pertinent gaps of the textbook and to highlight the critical components of the textbook. Lectures are not a substitute for the textbook. Some lectures (frequently large lectures) also have recitation classes. Often these lectures will take the full allotted time of the lecture to just complete all of the critical topics. Ask your questions in the recitation, at the end of either class or during office hours.

His teaching approach has to permit a student to grasp new concepts and techniques in a reasonable way. Along the way you will stumble on some ideas and approaches. This is normal. When you stumble your teacher is obligated to assist you in understanding and correcting your difficulty over some topic. Your teacher should not remove the stumbling block though and your stumble should not hinder your classmates.

Now that I've defended your lecturer, his/her job is to instruct you in a reasonable fashion. To demonstrate to a Dean that your instructor is not being cooperative, you will have to demonstrate due diligence in your efforts and a lack of effort by your instructor. For many good reasons this is a high hurdle to overcome. But sometimes it cannot be avoided. But I warn you, trying prove a lecturer wrong by going over their head can create many problems. Ironically, often when you are right.

I think that the method in this lecturers madness is not to just disseminate all the information for this rather simple problem, but to drive the student to search for the answer, just like in real life. I'm sure the textbook, if actually read, would explain the lesson being taught. He is just trying to mould these first year students to be successful in their following academic years and into the future. He has seen it all before, year after year, and developed this style for the good of his students.

I get what you saying Jaguar but what i know about this lecturer,is that from the time he started lecturing the course last year,students started failing whereas that previous year the lecturer that lectured that course who is actually a specialist in electrical engineering all the students passed with excellent distinctions because they were taught the basics from the beginning,where i on the other hand and so does the studentds in my class have'nt been taught the basics in the beginning.

Power,

Your points are well stated. But as I mentioned in my earlier post, unless you can demonstrate that your text book and this lecturer's classes cannot solve the problems given in class, homework and exams, you won't have a leg to stand on. But even if you succeed in demonstrating an unfair bias other factors can be in play.

It is possible that your freshman class has X times the number of engineering students that they can handle in later classes. So this class has been chosen as the filter to pass only 1/X students, along with building the necessary fundamentals to continue in the program.

But I do have to say, your original question on resistivity is a very basic question. I will admit, resistivity units of resistance*unit length erroneously implies just dividing one dimension to get the resistance of a conductor in that direction. A simple check of resistivity's definition from either a text book or the web should have solved your question on your own.