In high school, I was told that because I was a woman and because I was smart, I should go into a STEM field. Since I liked animals, it seemed logical that I’d be a perfect biology major. Never mind that I was terrible at math and memorization, tested poorly on written exams, and had minimal interest in research. I’d make a fortune, they told me. What could possibly go wrong?
The first week of my freshman year of college, I sat in my intro bio classroom, a lecture hall packed full of students. I stared down at the impressive volume of a textbook in front of me and listened as the professor started up a PowerPoint. Within a few minutes, I was baffled. I looked over my notes from the previously assigned reading, then back at the slide. They were… the exact same? The lecture was a mere repeat of what I’d read alone in my room the night before. The professor droned on and on, and I counted seconds ticking by. As the semester progressed I stopped reading and doodled my way through lecture. My pages filled with facts and figures and vocabulary I’d be tested on, but at the end of the day it meant nothing, and I couldn’t help but wonder if this was what science was all about.
Biology turned into a drone. I found myself drowning underneath a mountain of foreign words that I spent every waking hour cramming into my brain only to forget the next week. I found myself getting Cs on exams while getting As in all my humanities classes. When I talked to friends and went to office hours, I was told to study harder, try different memorization techniques. But that didn’t solve the underlying problem. I could spend hours learning words, but words are just words. At the end of the day they mean absolutely nothing if you can’t apply them. I’d been raised with the idea that science is always in question, that we should challenge everything because we still have so much to learn about the world. Yet everything was taught to me as the letter of the law, as some absolute truth we all had to submit to and obey if we wanted to get anywhere.
In my humanities courses I read, too, pages after pages for nights on end. Nothing there was fact, though. Nothing was treated as an absolute finality. Gone were the snooze-worthy PowerPoints, replaced with tantalizing discussions about ethics and morality and debates so fascinating I never wanted class to end. I was treated like a person of value, whose thoughts and opinions mattered. Instead of a below average student, I had purpose and found myself able to make meaningful contributions. At the end of the day, I walked away with a sense of having learned something, of having expanded my mind in a way no science class had ever done. If they want young people to pursue the sciences and succeed, perhaps it’s time we reevaluate our teaching mechanisms and foster curiosity instead of forcing it dormant with multiple choice scan-trons.
