Curriculum litmus test February 14, 2014
Posted by mareserinitatis in engineering, physics, teaching.Tags: evaluations, learning, students, teaching
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I received the written comments back on my student evals from last semester. I had a number of students who were very annoyed with the final project. The previous two years, the final project consisted of a Matlab project. After thinking about what a pain that was, I decided to change to a new project: a paper of 10-15 pages that has each student discuss their goals for getting through college. The general consensus among those who commented was that the project required too much work for a 1 credit class. There were several comments about how most of the other sections of this class don’t require as much work as I do, but the paper was just too much.
I’m sort of used to the comments about how much work my class is. I state up front that they can expect 2-3 hours of homework each week…for a 1 credit class (that is, we meet once per week for an hour). I also figure they had better get used to it, given the expectations of many of my colleagues.
I did find the comments slightly disturbing, however, because the implication seems to be that what I’m asking them to do is a lot of busy work. In a lot of classes, many students feel that they’re spending a lot of time doing things that they will never do again outside of college. They’re right, in a lot of cases. I took a ton of math as an undergrad, and Mike likes to tell people that I’ve forgotten more math than he ever learned. Sadly, the longer time goes on, the more I think he may be right.
The class I teach, however, is an academic skills class. This means I am teaching them how to get through school, particularly in the engineering curriculum. Do you know how to take notes? What are the key things that are important? Can you write a lab report? Do you even know what area of engineering you’re going into?!
These are the things I’m trying to teach them. My goal isn’t even to get them through the engineering curriculum, though a lot of the things I assign may be geared that way. I simply want them to get through school and graduate. I tell them this. It perplexes me, therefore, how they can view setting goals as a waste of time.
I really have put a lot of thought into my assignments. I want this class to be useful, and so I ask myself if each activity is something that will help them learn a skill they’ll need to get through school. In a lot of ways, I’m at an advantage: college is a very constrained environment, and I can tell what skills are useful until they graduate. After they graduate and get a job, however, their classwork may or may not be very valuable. It’s something that simply can’t be predicted.
I have had students come back to me and say that they are really glad I taught the class and they do use the skills that I taught them. I’m just not sure, however, how to make it clear to the freshman in my class that I really am not trying to torture them and that I do want them to succeed. I can only hope the ones complaining about writing their goals are so motivated and driven that a lack of clearly stated goals has absolutely no bearing on their performance in school over the next 3 1/2 years.
I also blog at Engineer Blogs, home away from home to some of the best engineering blogs.
What I did with a similar problem for a required freshman class was ask other students in a later required class (in their own words) to give advice to people taking this class. Then I cut out all their responses and pasted them on sheets of paper and xeroxed them and passed them out the first day of class next time I taught the class. There’s a reason we have required courses, otherwise we shouldn’t have them. But they seem to be more likely to believe the former students than the professor.
p.s. It worked.