Learning

A couple students sat with me at lunch in the cafeteria the other day. At one point in our conversation, it came up that I want my students to genuinely learn the material in my courses. This seemed authentically surprising to both students. As I recall, one of them even asked me why. I admit I was taken aback.

I understand that many students only go to college to get a degree, not to actually learn. There may be many reasons for this, but I suppose the largest is the pressure from society to get a degree--even if the degree is never necessary for the position that requires it. I have said before, and I still firmly believe, that this is harmful rather than helpful. Pressuring (or forcing) people to go to college who would not have elected to do so on their own--while perhaps granting job security to me--seems to be detrimental to education.

While I understand the reasons why students may go to college that are different from actual learning, I cannot relate to it personally. Yes, I admit my career of choice does require a degree (a PhD, in fact), and this is indeed one reason why I did as much schooling as I did. However, it was not my primary reason for going to college. As a student, I genuinely wanted to learn. (Yes, there were a couple classes I wasn't super interested in, and my performance in those classes was less than it could have been.) But I took classes just for fun. I took way more classes than were required to graduate. I graduated with 179.5 credits when I got my bachelor's degree. I took linguistics, just for fun. I took about twice as many 500+ level math classes as I needed. It was fun. It was fascinating.

So it's really difficult for me as an instructor to deal primarily with students who don't actually want to learn. It's frustrating and disheartening. To look into a student's eyes and see that the love for math and for learning in general that I felt as a student (and still feel, perhaps to a lesser degree) breaks my heart. It hurts to see students not actually wanting to learn. I had fanciful ideas that I would have students who actually were motivated by learning, and who would go above and beyond what was asked of them simply because the glow inside of them compelled them to do so. But if I've had any students like that, there have not been many.

I suppose the time it hurt the most was when I taught my first 400-level course. I had reasoned to myself that while 100-level classes were full of students forced to take it because of general education requirements, that 400-level courses would only have math majors who actually enjoyed math and wanted to learn it. But I quickly found that was not the case. Even among math majors, there was very little of that spark of interest in math purely for the sake of learning.

But, yes, I do want my students to learn. And I do try to convey my love of math, and hope that it will rub off on a student every once in a while. I love learning. I think knowledge is beautiful and wondrous. And I think we're all better off the more we learn.