That's a good resource, Bostonian.
I have read up about colleges that have come up here, like Caltech or Reed, or Swarthmore - wouldn't these be the places to go
I went to a college of this type. While I took a few survey courses that were factoid-heavy, it wasn't a lot, and I found many classes that were intellectutally exciting and not at all about rote anything. This was 20ish years ago and I am far from PG, so everyone else's MMV.
When I was
teaching less than 15 years ago, this was true, even at institutions of less 'prestige' than DD's current institution.
Times
really have changed-- and at the risk of sounding a bit repetitive or as though I have a particular vendetta against it, I do hold Pearson accountable for a large amount of this change. They are behaving a bit like a strangler fig, which one at first might write off as a relatively innocuous epiphytic organism, maybe even a mutually beneficial symbiotic one-- until you realize that it is stealing the core values right out from under you, while that slick facade never slips for an instant.
This is why a college-level
health class makes no mention of contraception or STD's, no discussion of adderall abuse or the burgeoning herion problem on college campuses, but DOES include ample doses of corporate-speak from "motivational seminars."
Val and I have both talked about these "automated" homework systems-- in chemistry and in mathematics. They are clunky and, from what I have seen in how students use them-- nearly useless in terms of actual student learning. But they've taken the place of meaningful practice in both subjects. Faculty are "experimenting" with those systems because enrollment numbers are driving it, along with pressure from-- well, from administrators, I guess. I understand the WHY of that quite well. Students have been conditioned (by secondary testing-testing-testing) to accept such shenanigans as normal SOP, and so few of them complain. On the other hand, when a few of them DO complain, and faculty actually
ask-- WHOAHHHHHHH, the floodgates OPEN WIDE on the subject. DD's chemistry professor was
astonished at the sheer scope of the messed-up that was MasteringChemistry. But he would never have known if I hadn't insisted that she complain about it. She wouldn't have if I hadn't told her that this was flatly MESSED UP-- as a student, she lacked the confidence to
know that the answers were sometimes wrong, or that there were formatting errors that shouldn't be there. KWIM?
I don't actually
remember studying much for any undergraduate course-- other than for memorization-heavy beasts like O-chem, botany, gross anatomy, etc. Everything else, there was little point-- you either had worked and UNDERSTOOD it, or you certainly weren't going to get there in an overnight cram-fest. I would not have been able to pass the classes that my DD has been in using that approach, one which she also excels at-- being able to rapidly REASON/derive her way to whatever she needs to solve problems on the fly.
It's no wonder to me that this is causing her some existential problems and anxiety.
Back to hothousing-- I don't really see it as hothousing if you aren't attempting to alter-- FORCE, actually-- the child's innate developmental arc.
I also admit that we DID hothouse some very specific skills-- executive skills, mostly.
