Participation

I would like to talk about what I think about classes where participation is a large part of the grade. I actually don't mind it as much in really small classes, but the larger it gets the worse off everyone is. People start to feel like they have to speak and just say whatever they want just to get those points, or marked off for the day for participation. This doesn't necessarily mean that they contributed anything meaningful to the discussion, or enlightened anyone in class. I have this class (not English 201) where participation is pretty important, and its about 40 people, and just listening to some of the people talk really bothers me. I'm not saying their unintelligent, but because of participation being forced many people speak, and ramble on until the teacher nods their head in approval of what their saying, so they can feel like they made a point, when really they just reiterated what someone else just said, or copied what they said just using some different words.
If classes like that put less emphasis on participation being needed for grades I feel the discussion would be much more beneficial to everyone in class. Again, a class like ours of about 20 is good, I haven't felt pressured to talk out of place for no reason yet, and I don't feel that it has been an issue or anything, it's just my other class where too many people talk for apparantly no reason. It just seems it would overall be better in midsize classes like that to let people talk when they want, not ramble for 4 or 5 minutes and throw in the point they were trying to make at the end that had nothing to do with what they were just talking about.
What's much worse than classes like that are ones where it's a large lecture, and there's always that kid that has to ask questions, about clarification, or something that hasn't been covered yet, just so the teacher will remember they asked the question and seemed interested. I'm sure everyones had classes with someone like that in it, where everyday you just expect them to raise their hand with 5 minutes left to get their 2 cents in for the day. If anyone reading this is that person, it's nothing against you, I just want to get out of class as soon as possible.