… realize just how powerful a condemnation of their school they’re expressing.
Roughly a third of the classes I have taken towards my bachelor’s degree have been general education requirements, and those have almost all been lecture, test, repeat. Since most of the information we are tested over is straight out of the textbook, is it really necessary for me to be there and watch a professor read from PowerPoint slides for an hour?
Is this in fact the way general education is taught at Southern Illinois University?
March 28th, 2012 at 2:46PM
The student is right on the money; that hits one of my remaining nerves and ignites the outrage machine.
You should visit some universities and see how so-called general education (neither general nor education, in too many cases) are taught. As a former provost put it, those requirements are valuable because they allow the administration to manage registration of student cohorts in a predictable fashion. The requirements are political (we want our share of students), not educational. The quality of teaching is of little interest to administrators or senior faculty. Stick a bunch of kids in a room with under-trained, unmonitored, underpaid TAs (we need grad course enrollments) or PTs, so that we can concentrate on “our work” and spend their tuition/fees on important stuff, like sending people half-way around the world to give a 20-minute insignificant paper. New hires are often told, when asked about tenure requirements, “Do your scholarship, don’t worry about teaching.”
I dismount from my hobby-horse. You may resume.