I used to TA a class whose covert purpose was teaching students how to think. The class encouraged everyone to use resources like Wikipedia whenever they didn’t know something, so that it could focus on things more interesting than merely gathering information. That class tried to get everyone to think about things, to use their existing knowledge to solve types of problems they’d never seen before, and to learn in a way that went way beyond memorizing facts and regurgitating them on the test. If the class covered probability, it would make students analyze card games or the lottery. If it reviewed trigonometry, students would have to derive some identities. In the labs, they had to write computer programs. And so on.
Many (most?) of the students were actively pissed off by this. Why were their questions to the professor answered with helpful links to Wikipedia or someone’s lecture slides, or a web page? Why did the class refuse to tell them exactly what they’d need to commit to memory to get a good grade on the tests? It went against everything they’d come to expect from “education”. And the computer programming was especially maddening; they couldn’t just pattern-match their way through it without thinking.
It was a required class for all freshmen in electrical engineering, and a lot of the graduating seniors said it had been one of the most valuable classes they’d taken. Not because of the material it covered, but because it had shaken them out of the bad habits they’d been given in high school “to prepare them for college.” It was an uncomfortable process for them at the time, though.
Many (most?) of the students were actively pissed off by this.
I think a class like this in isolation is bound to be off-pissing, no matter how useful it is. University courses have the extra problem of forcing you to be interested at a specific topic at a specific time. Students learn to grind through traditional courses even if they don’t feel particularly interested in the topic at the time of taking the course. That course sounds like tossing undergrads into something like the environment grad students are in for the duration, and grad school has a reputation for causing massive procrastination. Free-form problems need more spontaneous enthusiasm to come up with good approaches to, and bringing that up for a semi-arbitrary topic on command is harder than having it for a topic you are already interested in.
It’d probably still be learnable, given a whole curriculum of courses like this instead of just the one.
I used to TA a class whose covert purpose was teaching students how to think. The class encouraged everyone to use resources like Wikipedia whenever they didn’t know something, so that it could focus on things more interesting than merely gathering information. That class tried to get everyone to think about things, to use their existing knowledge to solve types of problems they’d never seen before, and to learn in a way that went way beyond memorizing facts and regurgitating them on the test. If the class covered probability, it would make students analyze card games or the lottery. If it reviewed trigonometry, students would have to derive some identities. In the labs, they had to write computer programs. And so on.
Many (most?) of the students were actively pissed off by this. Why were their questions to the professor answered with helpful links to Wikipedia or someone’s lecture slides, or a web page? Why did the class refuse to tell them exactly what they’d need to commit to memory to get a good grade on the tests? It went against everything they’d come to expect from “education”. And the computer programming was especially maddening; they couldn’t just pattern-match their way through it without thinking.
It was a required class for all freshmen in electrical engineering, and a lot of the graduating seniors said it had been one of the most valuable classes they’d taken. Not because of the material it covered, but because it had shaken them out of the bad habits they’d been given in high school “to prepare them for college.” It was an uncomfortable process for them at the time, though.
I think a class like this in isolation is bound to be off-pissing, no matter how useful it is. University courses have the extra problem of forcing you to be interested at a specific topic at a specific time. Students learn to grind through traditional courses even if they don’t feel particularly interested in the topic at the time of taking the course. That course sounds like tossing undergrads into something like the environment grad students are in for the duration, and grad school has a reputation for causing massive procrastination. Free-form problems need more spontaneous enthusiasm to come up with good approaches to, and bringing that up for a semi-arbitrary topic on command is harder than having it for a topic you are already interested in.
It’d probably still be learnable, given a whole curriculum of courses like this instead of just the one.
That’s fantastic. What school was this?