Every human being comes of age, if they live long enough. It is the transition between childhood and adulthood, and is far more ancient than humanity. In some organisms, the juvenile stage ceding to adulthood is more spectacular even than our own—consider the metamorphoses of egg into frog through a tadpole stage, or that of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly.
Thank you for this post Heather, as it's even making me reflect on my college years that were only a measly 8 or so years ago relative to your own. I was not a good high school student. I would argue that anxiety drove most of my issues with school but even though I took all honors and AP courses (5 my senior year) I was at most a C student. I found the whole setup tedious, tiresome, and really restraining in nature.
At college though my perspective was different. Here I knew that my parents were helping me pay (as well as all of the loans I am paying off now) so the perspective shifted. I couldn't skate by with "passable" grades that I paid for and improved my work ethic.
I always knew I wanted to be a scientist (COVID has definitely made me reconsider) but high school science is not the way it should be taught. It was so reductive, usually summarizing information so much that it really does not represent what its original intent was. There's a reason that people only remember the phrase "the mitochondria is a powerhouse of a cell" from their high school Biology course and I'm not even sure if they understand what that means.
It wasn't until I took Organic Chemistry in college that the lightbulb went off and everything started making sense! After years of learning Chemistry it took my sophomore year for me to finally understand many of the mechanisms and processes that occur in Chemistry. This actually led me to take more Chemistry courses even though I was a Biochemistry major and in my senior year I took nearly all advanced Chemistry courses (Advanced Reaction Mechanisms, Toxicological Chemistry, Biomedicinal Chemistry, etc.). It's a shame that, for many students, the interest in science is not encouraged but paradoxically bred out of students through monotony and obfuscation of information, such that there always appeared to be a "you'll learn this in a higher up science class" whenever a "what", "how", or "why" question was brought up.
As for mandatory liberal arts classes, I've been thinking about this concept for a while. I was fortunate enough that I got all of my liberal art credits out of the way through AP courses so I could focus on my Biochemistry courses and even double major in Psychology. But I was also part of my school's honors program which meant I needed to take additional courses. There were a few on Harry Potter literature and other courses on Gender Studies, but I went with a class I thought would serve some utility: Grammar and Usage. Now, I probably did not retain much from that class as can be seen in my writing but I thought it would at least serve a practical purpose in the future.
And here lies many of the issues with what we are seeing in college, at least from my perspective. Many students don't have time to worry about their liberal arts classes, and thus want to get it out of the way as quickly as possible. Therefore, they choose the "Easy A" class, which unfortunately happens to be the Women's Studies, Gender Studies, and other classes of that nature. They don't choose difficult classes- either their major is already difficult, they have to work, or they just don't want to bother with such classes. They would rather choose a class where they answer in agreement with the ideology or narrative presented if it meant they get an easy A rather than take a class that may require some effort but may serve some future utility. Thus, this leads to an artificial inflation of the interest of these subjects. Essentially, the Gender Studies department is being bolstered not by the interest of its actual students but by the complacency of students willing to forego a little more effort in order to just get it over with.
But anyways, this rambling is far long and should probably serve better as a post on my own Substack. Regardless, excellent work again Heather!
Thank you for this post Heather, as it's even making me reflect on my college years that were only a measly 8 or so years ago relative to your own. I was not a good high school student. I would argue that anxiety drove most of my issues with school but even though I took all honors and AP courses (5 my senior year) I was at most a C student. I found the whole setup tedious, tiresome, and really restraining in nature.
At college though my perspective was different. Here I knew that my parents were helping me pay (as well as all of the loans I am paying off now) so the perspective shifted. I couldn't skate by with "passable" grades that I paid for and improved my work ethic.
I always knew I wanted to be a scientist (COVID has definitely made me reconsider) but high school science is not the way it should be taught. It was so reductive, usually summarizing information so much that it really does not represent what its original intent was. There's a reason that people only remember the phrase "the mitochondria is a powerhouse of a cell" from their high school Biology course and I'm not even sure if they understand what that means.
It wasn't until I took Organic Chemistry in college that the lightbulb went off and everything started making sense! After years of learning Chemistry it took my sophomore year for me to finally understand many of the mechanisms and processes that occur in Chemistry. This actually led me to take more Chemistry courses even though I was a Biochemistry major and in my senior year I took nearly all advanced Chemistry courses (Advanced Reaction Mechanisms, Toxicological Chemistry, Biomedicinal Chemistry, etc.). It's a shame that, for many students, the interest in science is not encouraged but paradoxically bred out of students through monotony and obfuscation of information, such that there always appeared to be a "you'll learn this in a higher up science class" whenever a "what", "how", or "why" question was brought up.
As for mandatory liberal arts classes, I've been thinking about this concept for a while. I was fortunate enough that I got all of my liberal art credits out of the way through AP courses so I could focus on my Biochemistry courses and even double major in Psychology. But I was also part of my school's honors program which meant I needed to take additional courses. There were a few on Harry Potter literature and other courses on Gender Studies, but I went with a class I thought would serve some utility: Grammar and Usage. Now, I probably did not retain much from that class as can be seen in my writing but I thought it would at least serve a practical purpose in the future.
And here lies many of the issues with what we are seeing in college, at least from my perspective. Many students don't have time to worry about their liberal arts classes, and thus want to get it out of the way as quickly as possible. Therefore, they choose the "Easy A" class, which unfortunately happens to be the Women's Studies, Gender Studies, and other classes of that nature. They don't choose difficult classes- either their major is already difficult, they have to work, or they just don't want to bother with such classes. They would rather choose a class where they answer in agreement with the ideology or narrative presented if it meant they get an easy A rather than take a class that may require some effort but may serve some future utility. Thus, this leads to an artificial inflation of the interest of these subjects. Essentially, the Gender Studies department is being bolstered not by the interest of its actual students but by the complacency of students willing to forego a little more effort in order to just get it over with.
But anyways, this rambling is far long and should probably serve better as a post on my own Substack. Regardless, excellent work again Heather!