Completely agreed with the premise. I had something of the opposite experience: Truly excellent high school bio teacher, mediocre physics teacher, terrible chem teacher. I’d wanted to be a physicist since I was 5, but entered college wanting to be a biochem major.
That lasted all of one semester. Problem was, the intro courses for bio were full of (and geared towards) the hundreds of pre-med students who just wanted and needed to memorize the facts. Physics had a separate track for majors and non-majors. Chem had separate tracks for pre-med and physical science folks. Not bio, so I was stuck mostly re-learning things I already knew. Ironically, in my professional life two decades later, I don’t deal with biology itself at all, but I make extensive use of the little bits of complex systems analysis and modeling I picked up in my bio, biochem, biophysics, and biostatistics classes. I just didn’t need those at all in the classes themselves.
That ties into a part I find interesting. In society, we accord doctors very high status among professionals, but accord biologists comparatively low status among academics. Being a doctor is very hard and requires way more than just intelligence, I certainly couldn’t do the job. But, I struggle to think of another field where we accord what are, effectively, highly skilled technicians more status than we do research scholars.
I’ve been known to say that, done right, biology, and even more so psychology, should be the most difficult sciences, and physics is simple. Most people really don’t get what I mean, but the few that do are invariably interesting to talk to.
Thank you for your comment. I get what you mean. I predict with the increasingly intelligence and adoption of AI, that technical skills will become lower valued, whereas the creativity/generativity/coordination skills you refer to will take their place. I draw a comparison to how being able to “code a website” infers downtrending levels of skill today compared to 10 years ago, 20 years … etc.
Completely agreed with the premise. I had something of the opposite experience: Truly excellent high school bio teacher, mediocre physics teacher, terrible chem teacher. I’d wanted to be a physicist since I was 5, but entered college wanting to be a biochem major.
That lasted all of one semester. Problem was, the intro courses for bio were full of (and geared towards) the hundreds of pre-med students who just wanted and needed to memorize the facts. Physics had a separate track for majors and non-majors. Chem had separate tracks for pre-med and physical science folks. Not bio, so I was stuck mostly re-learning things I already knew. Ironically, in my professional life two decades later, I don’t deal with biology itself at all, but I make extensive use of the little bits of complex systems analysis and modeling I picked up in my bio, biochem, biophysics, and biostatistics classes. I just didn’t need those at all in the classes themselves.
That ties into a part I find interesting. In society, we accord doctors very high status among professionals, but accord biologists comparatively low status among academics. Being a doctor is very hard and requires way more than just intelligence, I certainly couldn’t do the job. But, I struggle to think of another field where we accord what are, effectively, highly skilled technicians more status than we do research scholars.
I’ve been known to say that, done right, biology, and even more so psychology, should be the most difficult sciences, and physics is simple. Most people really don’t get what I mean, but the few that do are invariably interesting to talk to.
Thank you for your comment. I get what you mean. I predict with the increasingly intelligence and adoption of AI, that technical skills will become lower valued, whereas the creativity/generativity/coordination skills you refer to will take their place. I draw a comparison to how being able to “code a website” infers downtrending levels of skill today compared to 10 years ago, 20 years … etc.