It sounds like the only way to win this game is by not playing it.
But then, what does that look like?
I have no idea-- the problem is
still that STEM requires this way and pretty much no other.
But we
are thinking about what other options look like.
It's soul-crushing-- and we certainly didn't expect that, having been faculty ourselves. I'm hopeful that maybe it's just the lower division/gen ed coursework. But I'm keeping my mouth shut on that score, tyvm. I'm not making this child any more promises about "it gets better when _____" because I quite simply don't even recognize some of what I thought I truly
knew.
It's kind of surreal.
PS-- for anyone that thinks that I'm exaggerating some of this, my daughter has spent the last 72 hours
memorizing the phrases that shall pay from a 300 page HEALTH textbook, including such "gems" as the number of calories present in 1g of each of several "essential nutrients" (a list which includes
ethanol, let me hasten to add), etc. etc. Do
you know how to define the following acronyms? FIIT, SMART, FIRST, EMDR. Do
you know the five steps to behavioral change? Can you give examples of General Adaptation Syndrome, explain the three hormones that are released as part of fight-or-flight responses, and explain the difference between essential body fat levels and healthy ones for both men and women?
This is a class that she and every other freshman on this campus is required to take in their first year. 90 multiple choice and/or matching and true-false questions, courtesy of Pearson's extensive test bank, I'm sure. You know, since they wrote that hash of a textbook, too. It has more different typefaces, photos of homogenous (smiling, model-thin, young, and distinctly WHITE) people, and BOLD, colorful text bubbles per square inch than a TIME layout does these days. Much of the information was outdated or inaccurate when it was "written" three years ago. And yet-- 40% of my daughter's grade in that course depends upon her facility in memorizing
over two HUNDRED "factoids" that she has committed to memory with index cards laboriously produced. Have I mentioned that my child struggles with hand writing due to a probable connective tissue disorder? Her dad and I have quizzed her, helped her play a timed "game" with them in groups of 24 cards, etc. etc.
I hope it's enough. We're all like AEH's kids around here. WE
don't (generally speaking) "memorize" our way out of anything rougher than a wet paper bag. We've been trying to make this fun by joking heavily about nutria ("Contraindicated" is sort of asking for this kind of definition, isn't it? As in "my nutria is a service animal") and cracking wise on the concept of dietary fiber... but really, this is awful. It wouldn't feel that way if it weren't for the fact that a lot of this is either unmitigated corporate-speak horse-derived fertilizer of the first order, and some of it is flatly WRONG-- not to mention just how much of it there is. It's astonishing, this kind of volume. I don't think I had this many notecards after a year of organic chemistry, or gross anatomy.
