The Correct Dosage of Education

"It's actually a little bit more complicated than that, but at this point you only really need to understand this much."

My beloved readers, I can't begin to express how frustrated I am with consistently having to listen to these words. This is an almost exact word-to-word quote that I could attribute to any of the at least 10 lecturers I have had in the past four semesters. Every single class, without fail, a lecturer will feel the need to both remind us that we are lowly undergraduates whose understanding of the world is severely lacking, and that their field is much more interesting and/or complicated than they lead us to believe.

There's nothing wrong with starting with the basics. In fact, there would be something severely wrong if the basics were completely ignored and more advanced things taught out of the blue. It's difficult to understand a concept you have no founding knowledge in (which is a completely different problem I may return to later). However, when every single lecturer in our undergraduate course can be heard saying this, there has to be something wrong, hasn't there?

Again, I understand that a lot of the concepts that we study could be studied in much greater detail (but if you go down that path, you'd require everyone to have PhD's in everything, which would be an interesting thing in itself). I understand that especially processes related to the biogeochemical cycle have a million different variables and are just as complicated as the almost-nonsense name would let you believe. I understand that there are plenty of things in science that are poorly understood. I still believe that when I am taught something, especially in a science course, I shouldn't have to take it on face value; I should be allowed to understand where and how and why this concept has come into being -- and I don't mean the tedious lesson on the history of this and that technique that every lecturer feels the need to include in their lectures.

I'm not saying it's not interesting. It's just that it's hardly ever examinable, and I've got too much examinable material to worry about in order to be able to fully appreciate some interesting non-examinable material.

Now, you could say that this is an avenue for independent study and that it is my responsibility as the student to go and find out more information on it. Unfortunately, this solution is a bit of a would-if-I-could, can't-so-I-won't type of affair.

You see, I complain a lot about how many assignments I have due and how much work I have and all the other complaints that you've heard all about by now. Usually it's not the assignments that gets to me -- homework isn't a foreign thing to me -- but it's the sheer volume of knowledge that I'm supposed to ingest and then digest during the course of the shortest of the short 12 weeks we call a semester. It's a bit ridiculous when you think about it: in a total of 72 weeks involving lectures, tutorials and labs, I am supposed to be eligible to graduate with a Bachelor of Science. That's 72 weeks of tertiary education. That's it.

Sometimes I don't even wonder why graduates aren't employed without significant work experience.

In that amount of time, it is impossible for both lecturers and some students (because I know there are those people out there who aren't massive nerds and are happy to get by with the smallest amount of work possible) to go into the amount of detail that they would like. I have heard this complaint from two lecturers already this semester -- that they may choose either to cover as much breadth as they possibly can by compromising the detail of some more complicated concepts, or they can sacrifice the breadth of our education for some more detail.

That's a situation I'm not particularly happy with. Sometimes I wish that our semesters were longer than just 12 weeks -- that our weeks were freer, that there were fewer assignments (or the same number spread over a larger amount of time) and more time to digest all of the information we are given.

I feel like university -- where I initially came to gladly to continue my education, since I have always loved academia -- as it currently stands, is destroying my love in science. And that, my friends, really sucks.