The greatest accomplishment of my career in math and science at Dartmouth, I believe, was being yelled at for talking in a 200-person lecture class. It was pretty great. The professor, armed with a microphone (it was a really big class), actually paused in the middle of a thought and said, "Excuse me, but I'm having trouble hearing myself talk." And he was looking right at me.
Clearly, I almost died of embarrassment, having to sit there for the rest of the class while other students gradually forgot to continue laughing at me and returned to their notes.
But by the time I got back to my dorm, I was ecstatic. Expecting nothing from that boring Wednesday morning class, I was surprisingly armed with a great story (one I'm still telling a year and a half later). But I don't think I was armed with too much else.
Still, I couldn't help but feel exasperated when a friend of mine said she refused to take the standard requirement-filling science classes; I couldn't understand why she didn't want to just take the normal "Math for Poets" or "Rocks for Jocks."
But the more I listened to her talk, the more I realized that she had a point. Buried somewhere in her practiced monologue about how she "thoroughly researched every science class offered at Dartmouth" and couldn't find any that met her standards was a very true and upsetting point.
It's virtually impossible to find an introductory class to fulfill the QDS, SCI, SLA or TAS requirement that's interesting, not too difficult, not too easy, taken seriously and not aimed specifically at majors. In other words, it's virtually impossible for a humanities student to find a satisfying science class (and I imagine it's difficult for math-types to find the perfect LIT class, too).
In the face of such a dilemma, I chose to do what many people do; I took classes aimed at non-science people, classes that filled giant lecture halls (when people actually showed up, at least), classes taught with the assumption that no one wanted to be doing the work or learning the material.
My friend, on the other hand, attempted to take the more honorable route. This term, she signed up for "real" math and physics courses, courses generally taken by math and physics majors. And within three days, she had dropped them both, and has since resigned herself to the world of introductory science for non-majors.
So now the poor thing, beaten by that requirements monster, is doomed to a term of suffering through a class that expects very little from her, breezes over interesting information in the easiest way possible and barely expects her to come.
Though I can certainly complain with the best of them, I've always thought Dartmouth's requirements were a pretty great idea. Unlike some other liberal arts colleges, Dartmouth forces us to build a general background in various important subjects. To some extent, at least, we will graduate with moderate knowledge in a fairly wide variety of areas.
The World Culture Requirement, especially, makes us devote at least ten weeks to the study of cultures we may not necessarily study otherwise. And that's great. We shouldn't come to college only to take obscure classes in one area.
Thus, in theory, the system is pretty cool. In practice, however, there's a lot missing. If we have to choose between scary, difficult classes for physics majors and impersonal, ridiculed classes for idiots, than we shouldn't have to fulfill the distributive requirements at all.
In my three experiences with such introductory classes, I was shocked by how easy the material was made (which sometimes makes complicated topics more difficult by over-simplifying them so that they can't be explained adequately). And I was shocked by how little was expected of us by the professors.
It's not to say that I breezed through the classes with amazing grades, because I most certainly did not. In fact, my lowest grade yet was one I received in an introductory biology course (one more elementary than the biology course I took in high school). These classes are simple. They just test our abilities at taking multiple choice tests, as opposed to our understanding of what could be interesting concepts.
Administrators, staff and students should really put some effort into creating introductory classes that are welcoming enough for math-o-phobes and also still satisfying experiences. We need classes that aren't too simple and aren't too general, classes that take the material and the students seriously, but classes that aren't so scary that non-majors can't last more than a week.
It may take time to develop a new attitude towards requirements, but something must change.
My friend should not have been forced to drop her interesting and difficult classes. And I should not have been allowed to do virtually nothing for an unpleasantly earned credit. (I say this confidently even with the dreaded TAS looming in my future.)
