Friday, April 8, 2011

You get what you pay for

Hello all,

I haven't been on here in too long. School and crew are keeping me busy, but I'm not complaining. Well, I am complaining, but not about something silly like hangnails or global warming. I guess I can bitch about the crew blisters a bit, but I'll get over it. It's just skin.

Allora. I am a psych major and as such am under the rule of the College of Arts and Sciences. Now, I'm happy to be a liberal arts major so that I can take a diverse class load and experience whatever I choose during my time at school, but there's a flip side that I had not anticipated. Each of my psych courses, extending to some 300 level courses, has a roughly 2 week period of introduction for the course, including most of the material learned in Psych 101.

If I have to learn about Phineas Gage or Sigmund Freud one more time, I'm going to shoot an iron rod through the teacher's mother.

I took Psych AP in high school, so I did not get to see the circus that is Introductory Psychology first person, but I have run experiments on many of the students in the class. Every time I get a group of students taking the course as an "easy A" for an accounting major or whatever, not caring about or remembering any of the information they payed to imbibe. These students then leave the 300 person lecture class and go off to find another psych class to not care about. Only about half of the students in the class are taking it for the subject matter as opposed to their credit or tier requirements.

I am all for diversity in education and feel that it is vital in school, but there must be a better way to accommodate the student. I have been denied entry to classes that I NEED to take for my major, and more than often several of the people in the class drop out anyway. There needs to be a class option for each course so that the students that already know the background info can jump right into the new material. I did a crossword in one of my classes and learned more from it than the lecture I've heard 3 times before.

It's difficult to accomplish this task with teaching budgets and class cuts, but it's just a thought for now. What is your major? Is there anything about the program you'd want to change?

I look forward to hearing from you, and tell your friends about me. I'll give them the same courtesy.
Flip out

2 comments:

  1. Very true aspects. I can agree with diversified teachings, but at some point it needs to be asked how much is necessary considering how many people going through the classes forget 99% of the material as soon as they pass

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  2. I'm in B.Comm... and I want to change everything about it. Half the courses are stupidly useless.

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