Don't teach me what to think, teach me how to think.
12 February 2011
This post was inspired by my Business Law class. A class in which you “have” to attend to take notes: no book, doesn’t post notes online, no homework, and four tests. Completely memorization based and I am about fed up with classes like this. In an upcoming post I will tell you how I have learned to “hack” these tests. No nothing unethical or illegal.
There are a number of things you just can’t learn effectively in a college lecture hall. Thinking back over my time in school one such subject sticks out in particular, Management. You learn how to manage by being managed, by both good and bad managers, and somewhat by working with a team. I remember reading about all these theories of management, different studies on management and productivity, and the history of management. I however do not remember any of the details.
You know why I can’t recall jack from that class? It’s because the class was setup to where the teacher gave you a mountain of information, mostly directly from the textbook, via a lecture. These are the worst types of classes, why? Because they are so information intensive that unless you actually really truly care about the content you are going to end up memorizing it and forgetting it immediately after the test. Hint: Most college students don’t care about actually learning from their classes, they just want that piece of paper with their name, the college’s name and some signatures on it preferably while exerting the minimum effective dose of effort.
After the first day I realized what kind of class it was going to be. Total number of days I actually attended class? 5. Why five? There were four tests. I ordered the book off amazon and memorized exactly what the teacher would have told me in class by taking notes over the book the week leading up to each test.
Look if you are going to make us take bullshit classes like this at least make them available online without having to pay double. There should also be a disclaimer on the class, “Warning: Taking this class in no way qualifies you to manage anyone.” Want to learn more about management? Spend a semester working at McDonalds.
Now I am in no way saying I am a good manager. I manage myself well enough I guess, but when it comes to others I have failed miserably trying to manage just one other person. There are numerous excuses I could give as to why it hasn’t worked but the one I settled on is that I expect others to have the ability to manage themselves at least to a degree of, “I need to make sure this gets done by tomorrow morning, I should put off hanging out with my girlfriend for a few hours and sit down, focus and knock this out.”
I got a B in that management class and cannot manage a single person. If I would have put in the effort to get an A in that class magically have made me a successful manager? Doubt it.
Now I am not going to sit here and degrade higher education without trying to fix it. Want to know the type of class that is actually worth the hundreds or thousands of dollars we spent on them? Classes that don’t teach you what to think, but how to think. This is what science and math are all about. Give students freedom, give them real world projects, get out of the way (a bit of guidance every now and then would be okay, I mean that’s what we are paying for right?) and let them surprise you. Sure there are going to successes and failures, but I guarantee you they will learn more from failing to deliver a project than they will failing a test.
Going back to teaching management, if you were to split a class into four person teams, give them four projects throughout the semester and tell them that one person must manage each project. I guarantee each of those students will have learned more about management in that one semester than the sum of the entire lecture hall full of students learned about management the old way.
My next post will underscore the pointlessness of these memorization based classes. It will detail how I only went to one class (the first day, attendance required) and got a 94.5% on the first test.