Computers in school

Rosemary Michelle Simpson rms at cs.brown.edu
Tue Aug 7 18:35:56 UTC 2001


On Tue, 7 Aug 2001, Rev Aaron wrote:

> On Tue, 7 Aug 2001 12:45:17 -0400 guzdial at cc.gatech.edu (Mark Guzdial) wrote:
> 
> >By "boredom" I mean a bunch of things that make a class
> >un-interesting.  Assignments that have no real purpose or don't lead
> >to real artifacts can lead to "boredom."  Being forced to use
> >strategies that don't work for you can lead to "boredom."
> 
> That's the impression my SO has of the majority of college classes she's
> taken in the last two years. Especially in the lower level, intro classes,
> where they try to cram tons of somewhat-useless information into your
> head, and grade you on how well you can regurgitate it.  That's how
> the first two years of college seem to go, you get judged on how well you
> can tell the prof what s/he told you, but no real synthesis.  And that can
> be done with a good book or two, making the entire multi-thousand year
> of college education a giant waste of money.

That wasn't my experience at all of the core curriculum when I went to
college, although that certainly does describe my high school experience.
The reason I changed from an entering Chemistry major to History was the
quality of the required freshman European History course.  It was
fascinating - the lectures showed that history is a time-based framework
for exploring all of human experience and the exam questions made me probe
and analyze and think about the connections and implications of what I had
studied.  I left those exams knowing more than when I went in.  As a
result of that experience I am a supporter of core curricula because it
introduced me to areas that, based on my previous experience, I would
never have explored.

R.






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