“Is this on the exam?”
“Sort of.”
I’d just shown my students how to use trigonometric substitution to simplify the process of integrating functions involving radicals. If esoteric integration techniques aren’t your thing, what you need to know is that there are many of them. Many many.
What I’ve seen is that most instructors teach the myriad techniques in a way that positions them equally in students’ minds. In reality, some approaches are used far more frequently than others. I’m reminded of an old saying,
“If everything is important, nothing is important.”
Mass Production Produces Mass
It’s no secret that our education system was birthed during the industrial revolution (though many are surprised to learn that we haven’t been doing school this way for thousands of years). Despite how enshrined the notions of grades, credits, departments, majors, minors, entrance exams, and their like have become, the truth is that everything we associate with school was created in the late 1800’s to early 1900’s in response to one of humanity’s key inventions: the assembly line.
The mindset of mass production is to “fill every gap.” If we find a way to make room in a schedule, we quickly find a way to fill it with something new. After a few generations of thinking this way, we’ve (by and large) lost our ability to discern the forest from the trees.
Curriculum Bloat
The real problem with curriculum bloat is that it squeezes out opportunities to explore. When we have trouble fitting in all of the “necessary” topics or courses, room to play disappears. Rather than tinkering and making new connections between ideas, we’ve painted ourselves into a corner: we now judge every topic and course based on “relevance.”
I asked my students what their approach to college is. The most common response was “just trying to survive.” We are fire-hosing our students with content, leaving no room for actual growth as thinkers, connectors, problem solvers.
Minimum Viable Objectives
I’ve come to believe that the word “relevant” actually means “the connections between ideas that we’ve made in the past.” Humans are amazing at finding links and trends, forming connections between concepts that seem unrelated. It’s what we do. It’s what we’ve been doing since before recorded thought.
The mistake we’re making right now is that we think our students must first master all of the connections made by those who came before as a prerequisite to making new connections of their own.
We’ve run up against a wall and now judge everything on how “useful” it is. Here’s why students are frustrated with the Gen Ed program (they don’t see why engineers should study poetry or why poets should study calculus). It’s why students don’t take wild and weird electives. What if someone gets a “C” in Basket Weaving and is denied admission to med school? It’s why we want to wring every ounce of value for the dollars invested: we’ve created an environment in which the end of education has been reduced from “world prep” to “job training.”
On the other hand, most of what we’re teaching was “discovered” in a time where people had a lot more breathing room in their courses and curricula. After all, the first scientists and engineers were also philosophers who spent time digging into how the world works – not having an instructor tell them.
If we want to make room for new ideas, new solutions to new problems, we need to stop asking “how do we fit it all in?” and start asking “what is the minimum viable set of objectives?” – and then we need to follow through by creating environments that challenge our students to explore in the margin this shift creates.
