[plain thinking] WHAT IS THE PROBLEM? There is a growing clamor around the country to induce students to study “STEM” subjects: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Along with that clamor usually goes a devaluation of humanities subjects such as English literature, history and philosophy. “Why study those? They don’t enable graduates to find well paying jobs.” The arts get similarly short shrift. At the same time we hear a clamor for people capable of “critical thinking” and for people who can communicate well, both orally and in writing. There is an inherent contradiction in wanting the country to create people competent in science and math and demanding that students be equipped with critical thinking skills on the one hand and devaluing the humanities on the other. In this essay we explore some of the ramifications of this contradiction. The great majority of the 200 people enrolled in my general biochemistry course cannot write a coherent paragraph, and a significant fraction cannot write consistently grammatical sentences. What appears over and over in essay answers is a stringing together of words whose meanings are in the general area of the question but which make no sense in the question’s context. It’s as if the student had no idea of how to frame a direct response to the question and so dredged up from memory any words or phrases which might conceivably earn a few points. We also encounter run-on sentences, lack of or incorrect punctuation, random capitalization or none, incorrect word usage, a list which could go on. Colleagues who teach related courses at my own university and across the country report the same problems. All the students in general biochemistry have passed two years of chemistry, the second of which, Organic Chemistry, they must pass with grades of C or better. What is more, by the time they take the course, nearly all have passed a year of calculus, a year of biology, a year of physics and a semester of genetics. They will also have taken two semesters of English composition (!), so although the class is large, it is a selected group consisting of third- and fourth-year undergraduates and a scattering of graduate students. In spite of all this background, the average level of written work is atrocious. The best students, a small and unchanging percentage of the total, are as good as the best students anywhere and as good as the best have ever been. They handle writing well, and they include a fair number for whom English is a second or third language. I think they succeed in spite of the educational system, not because of it. However, it is the great majority with whom we are concerned here. By and large, the students are not lazy, although there are 34
always some of those around. The majority work hard. A great many of them, though, don’t know how to study. They cram for a few days before an exam. They cobble lab reports and papers together close to the due date. Their academic work is a series of looming deadlines, and they rush from one to the next. There is an expectation that problems on exams will follow templates which have already been encountered and that what needs to be done is to use different numbers or give back learned material. Should a computational problem or an essay question require pulling disparate material together in a way they have not seen, they are lost. Most biochemistry students have the intellectual horsepower to handle the subject. They are accustomed to getting good grades in their lower level courses by dint of memorization, so they learn to do that. Literally dozens of students come to my office during the year because they are concerned about their grades, having done well in earlier courses but coming up with 30 percent to 50 percent on general biochemistry exams. Some are stunned. Although I spend a lot of time with individual students coaching them on how to study productively over a long period of time without having to cram, that is not the main source of the problem. Neither is the fact that they are overburdened with too many academic requirements or that they may be working many hours a week to cover their college expenses. When students tell me they are having trouble because they are not good at math or at chemistry, they are describing symptoms, not causes. A large part of the problem is that they see science and mathematics as combinations of facts to be absorbed, procedures to be mastered and the like. These are presented in a linear fashion, one item following another, all having been worked out in advance and presented in a 1,000-page textbook. When I tell them that the course is the lectures and the text is an adjunct to the lectures, the majority don’t absorb that statement. In most of their prior courses, if they master the text—organic chemistry reactions, calculus and physics formulas, biology classifications, etc.—they earn grades of A. No one can do that in biochemistry. There is too much, and the attempt to master all of it means the main ideas will be lost in a sea of apparently unrelated details, which will themselves soon be forgotten, as the student will have no mental framework on which to hang them. What is more, the linear presentation in textbooks is deceptive. Everything in biochemistry is related to everything else in a complex, multilayered web; that’s the way living cells are made and the way they operate. That complexity may be why so many students seem baffled when they encounter the subject.
