It's a problem the Office of Institutional Assessment and Studies has analyzed for the past four years, and it is near ready to compile its data. But don't hold your breath for any grand schemes to make students interested in those science, math, sociology and other courses many attend with the most half-hearted of efforts. How those classes are taught still will remain a pestering issue to academia, both here and at the University. Some students, in fact, will retain misinformed data, never having their incorrect assumptions being redressed. Many students who have completed their requirements can testify to attending the classes of one or more teachers who merely unload the facts and figures rather than teach them.
Some teachers impart the knowledge in the same manner, year after year.
That technique soon becomes stale and students realize the difference of being taught and being treated as a conglomeration of mass consumers. Critics of student education mistakenly assume their pupils only wish to learn what is immediately valuable to their future welfare. What all students need, and subconsciously want, is modern relevance to what they read on the chalkboard and in their texts. A perfect example to this point was Biology Prof. Rolf Benzinger's spring 1995 100-level DNA class. Benzinger caught students attention not because of what he taught but how he did it.