You sometimes get those professors who always have something to prove, getting into curriculum way above the course level, pushing their ideas as only being the right ones or just the mere fact that they need to achieve their tenure status.
It's in your hands to choose your major, your Miami Plan courses and your overall course load. So, is it the luck of the draw of getting great teachers, or is it that there's just something wrong with the students? How eager are we to learn according to the teacher's mandate? How eager are we to learn at all?
A new study, published in Academically Adrift from the University of Chicago Press, found 45 percent of the nation's undergraduates learn very little in their first two years of college. According to the researchers, the students studied showed no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years. The first two years of college just seem to be a strangely similar repeat of the high school curriculum.
Some students even got all of the way through college without learning much. The study found 36 percent of students showed little improvement even after four years. Solitary study and more reading helped results, but social engagement and participation in the Greek system did not.
Alright, I see how these different factors can change how a student performs academically, but here's the problem. If we're trying to be the "most marketable" people we can be to get promising jobs and maybe retire at a reasonable age, classrooms and textbooks just don't cut it. I believe that students are eager to learn, it's just how and what they choose to learn sometimes becomes a flawed process.
Poor time management hinders the process. Earlier this year, two economists at the University of California found that over the past four decades the time college students spend in class and studying has decreased substantially, from 40 hours a week in 1961 to 27 hours a week in 2003. So, what are we doing with our time?
When I wrote a few articles back how students are bred for competition, with internship searches, jobs during the summer, et cetera, I wasn't treading lightly. What you do with your time outside of academic studies molds you into the person you want to become. More importantly, it shapes how you want to grasp your own future.
It's not that students aren't learning anything in college. Learning isn't just about the student-teacher relationship. It's the friend-to-friend relationship, the adviser-student relationship and the employer-employee relationship as well.
It's not just about the résumé builder and the high GPA. This is the time to do something for ourselves because we are in control of how we learn values and gain experience. Regardless of who tries to influence our learning process, it is ultimately in our hands.
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