Teaching methods should be changed

I hate school. I love learning, but I hate the structure of school. College should be taught through actual hands-on approaches and less force-fed textbook reading. School should be taught through completing assignments and then learning from our mistakes.

Teaching assistants could simply hand out 12 pages at the beginning of the year, one for each lab in a laboratory course. All we really need is the procedure to get a lab done. We could save some trees and the theory behind our lab could be explained as an afterthought.

Is it necessary for us to wade through pages and pages of mental muscle-flexing that masks the methods that we actually came here to learn? Why should we be asked to search a variety of sources just to come to conclusions that our teaching assistant could have given us in 10 minutes? The most I’ve ever got from a laboratory course is a euphoric high from the chemicals in my organic lab.

If Purdue professors are trying to improve our research skills with their fact-finding missions, we can search sources without a class. I can research the proper mechanism for changing a carboxylic acid into an alcohol on my own. But I’m not going to school to find out things on my own, I’m going to school in order to be taught.

In fact, if I were on my own, I could study all the things I want to study and none of the things that I don’t. For instance, why does a biology major, such as myself, need to take four semesters of foreign language as a requirement to graduate?

If I really wanted to learn Spanish I’d move to Argentina and learn the language the way any other poor fool (who took Spanish in college) ended up learning it — by immersing myself in it. It would cost me almost as much as going to school here and I might be able to meet some wannabe supermodels (I hear a lot of them come from Argentina). It would be cool. I could hang out at bars all week, meet hot babes and, on top of all that, it would be educational.

School would be okay if it ended at five and you could get on with the rest of your life. But no, there's a trailer-load of homework to do, and with evening exams it’s hard to ever get a break. The University Senate graciously suspended a bill that will allow professors to monopolize one more night of your week. If they get their way, we can enjoy evening exams on Monday nights as well.

I mean, come on, we don’t need evening exams, plenty of universities get along just fine without them. I know I could. Some of us (not me, but some of us) are trying to have social lives or hold jobs in the evenings.

Maybe daytime exams would be inconvenient for the professors, but it’s inconvenient for me now, and I’m not getting paid to be here.

The other thing I dislike is professors that give too much homework. I’ve got a professor who has homework due the day before his midterm. We’re not in kindergarten anymore; we don’t need to be helped along in order to get our work done.

I used to get C's and D’s when I was in elementary school. Not because I didn’t understand the work, but because I wouldn’t jump through the friggin’ hoops. I also never learned how to spell "Acknowledgment." I started getting A’s in high school. Mostly because the tests became more of the grade, the busy work less and they didn’t have spelling anymore.

I did learn how to spell, I learned my phonics and I learned how to write, but it wasn’t from taking any class. It was from reading; lots of reading and lots of writing on my own. I learned from making mistakes.

Amazingly, I learned how to write and spell the same way I learned how to walk and talk, the same way I will learn Spanish and biology. Not from taking a class, but by actually going out there and using it.

That’s the only way people really learn what’s important and what’s just a bunch of bull. We can be taught a method, but it is only after the method has been taught that we can fully understand the theory. It is only after we have made mistakes that we can reasonably be told or taught the reasons for them.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot of homework to do.

Ian Clift is a sophomore in School of Science.

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