I don’t know if any of you guys have noticed this throughout your educational career, but every time you go up a new “level” of education, your professors/teachers always drone on and on about how different it will be. They are also very seldom correct.
Going from elementary school to middle school, and middle school to high school, they mostly just said stuff like “you won’t be at the top of the totem poll anymore; you won’t be the oldest kids or the coolest kids anymore” (my middle school principle had an assembly for all the 8th graders where he explicitly said this to us). This much was correct.
Middle school teachers also insisted that high school would be harder and the work more rigorous. We would have to take better notes and study more if we wanted to do good. This was definitely not true for me, but maybe it was true for the less intelligent kids? In fact, my note taking got progressively worse in high school because I came to realize I didn’t actually need to take notes. I used to be an avid note taker in middle school, but in probably less than 2 years of high school I was literally never taking any notes for anything, even my “advanced” classes. I never studied for anything, even in middle school. My grades never suffered from any of this. I remained an honor roll student, my test scores were higher than almost all of my peers (there were usually only 2 people in the entire grade who could compete with me consistently), etc.
In senior year of high school my teachers began to repeat this same mantra, this time about college. They said that college would be different, because we would not be memorizing dates and names, but would instead be expected to understand and apply principles, rules, themes, etc. for use in class and on tests. Frankly I have no idea why they told us this, because I was not in general education (gen ed) classes in high school. Honors and AP classes (the latter of which literally are college classes) already apply this method of learning. For example, high level biology classes in high school expect you to be able to name organs and to explain their function in the body. I had a number of gen ed friends, and when I looked at their homework it did seem to be date/name memorization stuff. But I don’t really understand why the told the advanced kids this, since the whole point of our classes was to mimic college classes.
Getting to college, professors said the same thing. “This would not be like your high school classes of idle memorization… yadda yadda.” I guess this makes sense, since not all college students were in AP/Honors classes where you were already doing applications and things like that. Again, this much does seem to be generally true even if it was not the case for me personally. Regardless, I still did not take notes or study for my classes. Admittedly, this was not a great idea for calculus, especially since I was not even taught pre-calc in high school when I was supposed to be (teacher only taught on observation days when the principle was watching, which is like 2 days a year lol). But I never had trouble with it outside of that, and honestly I did not enjoy calculus that much. Sorry to all my math bros out there, I just don’t find math that interesting. Never really have. Anyways, my study habits remained the same as in high school; no notes and no studying. In fact, I never even read the books we used in our book reports. I usually got As on these book reports as well. I never made lower than a B, and I never got caught. I still had over a 3.5 GPA and I was (I guess still am, since it’s a lifetime membership) a member of Phi Alpha Theta, which is the/a (?) national history honors society. I’ve had professors recommend that I et my paper’s published in the undergraduate research journal before (though I never did, unironically because I wanted to be able to post them to iFunny lol). All of my teachers respected me as intelligent, and more often than not my professors had to ask me to stop talking and let other students speak because I was dominating the discussion.1
One of my favorite examples was when we had an Enlightenment style salon debate where we had to pick one of four Enlightenment thinkers (Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Robert Filmer). You all know I’m Hobbes’ top guy, so I was already beast mode as it was. But there were a number of points where other people messed things up, and I corrected them or gave the ammo for a better argument. Most embarrassingly was when one of the people on team Rousseau said that the State of Nature was bad, which is NOT what Rousseau thought. Anyways that story doesn’t have much to do with the post, I’ve just been in an Enlightenment sort of mood lately. Maybe I will finally finish the long awaited “Defense of the Enlightenment” post.
Back on topic. I thought this sort of thing was going to stop when I got to law school. None of my professors really harped on what grad school would be like. Looking back, I suppose this was for a few reasons:
Many of these classes already had grad students in them who were either taking it as an elective or were taking the grad student-specific section of the class. It wouldn’t make sense to waste your time talking about this to a class that is already half grad student anyways.
The majority of the students there were not going to grad school. Most of the other undergrads did not plan to go to grad school. Some, like me, were not just going to “grad school” and were going to law school or med school, which are themselves different from regular grad school.
There are already a lot of campus resources on the topic. It’s on the website, there are flyers/brochures, and their are advisors who are actually supposed to tell you about this stuff instead of professors.
So for the past few months I’ve just assumed that maybe, for once in my life, professors would actually know what goes on at other levels of education. That changed while I was watching a recorded lecture as part of the online introduction class for law school.
Like come on dude. Seriously?
I was already getting suspicious of law school, because these lectures kept making such a big deal about to Socratic method of learning. I get it, it’s a hallmark of law school. Even non-law students know what it is. But it isn’t even exclusive to law school. Once you get to about your junior year of undergrad (when you start taking more 300 level or higher classes) this is basically how all classes operate. You may still have a few lecture days (which is not even uncommon in law school, by the way), but most classes will be “discussion days” using the Socratic method. In fact, one of my professors explicitly referred to what she was doing as the Socratic method and singled me out as the only future law student to say this is what is used in law school. I don’t know, maybe this is less common for STEM major or something (please let me know in the comments). But this is basically how all Humanities classes are. I mean the top three majors for law school (history, philosophy, and political science) all operate on this system, and I would know since I’ve taken high level classes in all three fields. So you would think law professors would know that people are used to this already.
I don’t usually have a “big take away” in my Stumpsides, but I do for this one. I think one of the biggest problems with the US education system (at every level) is that nobody talks to each other. They are not set up for an easy transition from one level to the next, and most of the time each level seems to be confused about what the other is doing. Maybe I am just autistic for noticing and keeping tabs on all these things, but I don’t think this can be a positive force for students in the US. I’ve talked a lot about other issues in the past, but not this one. I think this one may also be the most pressing, since it permeates each level of the education system.
Many people will say that high school in the US sucks because you don’t usually get to take classes that will properly prepare you for college, outside of a few very specific degrees. For example, aside from math classes, no high school class ever really prepares you for engineering in college even though that is a very popular major. It’s true that this is a problem, but it goes so much deeper than that. High school teachers don’t even seem to know what college is like (which is insane btw, since they have to go through college to become a teacher) so they have no idea where to even begin. Beyond even that, this also means that students are just getting redundant information, or sometimes even straight up false information. Neither of which is a good precedent to set for the education system.
Posted this from my drafts using the mobile browser version of the app cuz I forgot to post before work and won't be home for a while teehee.
The average student wastes over a year of schooling. The average 115 IQ (what most people would call “high midwit”) wastes a staggering 3-4 years. The average 145 IQ genius could be in college by fourth grade. This is all done for the sake of 90 IQ students who will never remember or use anything past the 7th grade anyways. Public education is unironically the biggest money sink in human history. This is also why so many people think they are special for being told they have a reading level above their grade. It’s because even the average Joe is learning stuff meant to be learnable by a half-retard, and understandably exceeds that. Can you imagine a world, where only 50% of people attend high school, and classroom sizes could be halved? A world where we only have to waste 3-4 days in school a week, and where many people can have private tutors just like the Greeks? And we would have money left over for other things. Think of how much of our lives we could have gotten back, how much of our lives our children can get back. The best part of our lives, at that. But it’s only going to get worse from here, because of the rising tide of color.