I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about these questions and in grad school the issue of “fixing” lower level STEM courses was one of the primary recurring discussions among my friends.
For my part I am slightly too old and/or my university was slightly too hidebound to adopt clickers before I graduated. The primary mode of instruction in chemistry classes was always passive slide shows which are dreadfully hard to attend to, and on top of that introductory chemistry courses are riddled with lies-to-children and unexplained rules of thumb which interfere with intuitive understanding of chemistry. Physics was standard derivations-and-examples whiteboard lecturing with an extremely painful online homework component. Calculus and differential equations were improved by the inclusion of labs relying on the Maple package.
I will say that in general intro classes were stressful, unpleasant, and demoralizing for me, and I am somebody who went on to get a PhD, so you could safely say that I struggled through despite those courses, rather than being excited by them. I think the reason I think and talk about this so much is that this fact makes me angry. Chemistry, physics, mathematics, electronics, geology—these are beautiful and fun things which I now love, and introductory courses, rather than teaching me to love them, seemed designed to systematically ruin them for me.
I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about these questions and in grad school the issue of “fixing” lower level STEM courses was one of the primary recurring discussions among my friends.
For my part I am slightly too old and/or my university was slightly too hidebound to adopt clickers before I graduated. The primary mode of instruction in chemistry classes was always passive slide shows which are dreadfully hard to attend to, and on top of that introductory chemistry courses are riddled with lies-to-children and unexplained rules of thumb which interfere with intuitive understanding of chemistry. Physics was standard derivations-and-examples whiteboard lecturing with an extremely painful online homework component. Calculus and differential equations were improved by the inclusion of labs relying on the Maple package.
I will say that in general intro classes were stressful, unpleasant, and demoralizing for me, and I am somebody who went on to get a PhD, so you could safely say that I struggled through despite those courses, rather than being excited by them. I think the reason I think and talk about this so much is that this fact makes me angry. Chemistry, physics, mathematics, electronics, geology—these are beautiful and fun things which I now love, and introductory courses, rather than teaching me to love them, seemed designed to systematically ruin them for me.