In these first few weeks of college, one of the things I’ve noticed is that it’s far less easy to settle into a routine than it ever was in high school or over the summer. By the fourth week of summer camp, I was completely prepared for everything that would happen—some new challenge might get thrown into the mix, but for the most part, every week was the same.
Of course, college schedules happen to differ a lot from the high school/summer norm—instead of having classes 9-3 every day, I’ll have entire blocks of time in the middle of the day with nothing, then my loathed 5-7PM or 7-9PM night classes. And yet, it is still a schedule; maybe not as easy to make routine, but still something that stays rather constant.
The issue isn’t that the classes don’t repeat—it’s that every day offers different opportunities and no two club meetings or tech talks or moments spent hanging out ever are quite the same. And the lesson to be learned from all of this—if there even is one (and there doesn’t always have to be)—is that repetition is evil. Doing the same thing over and over is boring and more importantly distracts from what we actually should be doing—constantly learning, growing, exploring, solving, and finding interesting problems. But is boring repetition unavoidable?
Most of the education system seems to be designed around the idea that yes, repetition is both necessary to learning and an unavoidable aspect of adult life. In high school ideas in STEM classes are reinforced by problem sets; for some reason, prevalent wisdom among mathematical and scientific educators is that doing the same thing over and over ultimately drills it into our minds. In theory, it makes sense that practicing a single technique or method will make someone strong at it; in practice, someone who understands the first problem probably doesn’t really care what the answer to the 50th is.
This ideology of repeating one aspect and then moving on to the next has its clear drawbacks. The most obvious flaw in the methodology is that anyone who has difficulty doing the early problems is likely to altogether give up when they arrive at the later ones. Of course, educators tend to argue that it is difficult to teach people who “don’t want to learn,” but how do we make someone want to learn when the only reason we give them for knowing algebra is being able to solve the 50 boring problems siting in front of them right now? Even if they do master the subject material, there is no solid reason to remember it (other than the already antithetical “you’ll need to build on it for next year’s class”).
The solution isn’t story problems by the way—usually they are just as one dimensional and boring as the other problems. Story problems aren’t there to make math or science more interesting, they are there to see that you can conceptually analyze a problem in addition to being able to numerically solve. Why would anyone care how many apples Sally had left any more than they would care what x is equal to in the equation 3x-7=11?
Another flaw less obvious but still prevalent in the “repetitive enforcement” methodology is the idea that each concept presented must be small and build upon the last. The idea that there is an inherent “order” in some fields or concepts leads to, for example, the first lesson in most introductory physics courses being vectors—something essential in analyzing complex problems but completely uninteresting without kinematic descriptors and dynamic laws for them to interact with. In the same vain, we insist on course orders knowing full well that every single course actually overlaps. Trig is essential to calculus but how many students who haven’t actually taken calculus actually understand where e comes from? Chemical reactions at a molecular level are best explained by physics; biological processes on a small scale are best explained in chemical terms; biological processes on a large scale may be described in sociological or psychological terms; statistics takes many of its essential derivations from calculus; even basic algebra includes elements of set theory and number theory.
There is no good reason for us to approach every single field this way. We insist on isolating the way fields are taught in high school when we can’t even isolate the fields ourselves. We teach physics late because we think high level math (trig, calculus) is essential to understanding, yet we teach chemistry before physics when we know that thermal and chemical physics are essential to our understanding of chemistry. More importantly, no one will bother to learn when they aren’t working on something interesting—even the most talented minds are wasted on problem sets because there isn’t a single good reason a problem set presents for a student to want to learn. Isn’t the most critical element of the education system that we understand concepts—not only how they work, but why?
We do need to reinforce ideas, build upon what has come before, and provide some sort of division and order to classes (after all, K-6 science education is nearly worthless thanks to no clear learning objective in the science system). We just need to do this in a constructive manner. Repetition is boring and will turn students off of homework or even entire fields altogether—social studies education, which at the high school level pivots around students actively discussing, debating, and deconstructing topics with the ultimate goal of putting them back together and building something new, tends to be much more successful in imparting ideas then STEM classes do, even though there isn’t really any good reason microeconomics should be easier than calculus. Already, educational programs exist which attempt to do this in STEM (programs like IMP and physics classes structured around introducing kinematics and dynamics conceptually before introducing mathematical analysis)—but the complaints leveled at these programs tend to be that they “fail to prepare students.”
Fail to prepare them for what? More repetition? Our problem isn’t backwards compatibility—we need to revamp the system in order to make it work. Repetition may in fact be necessarily every once in a while, but even in adult life the tasks that present themselves differ from day to day. At a minimum, we can’t just keep repeating the same thing over and over. We need to be more creative—maybe then our students can be.
