Preamble: This term, the ENVE 330 Field Sampling and Techniques course overhauled its teaching style. In order to “give students a chance to develop presentation skills,” the class’s lectures are now entirely peer-taught. The students were split into 9 groups, and each group was assigned a topic about which they will prepare and present a 3-hour lecture. This is to be done for the remaining 9 weeks of lectures.
Two weeks into the semester, hearing that the remainder of an engineering course will be taught completely by students had me laughing. Of course, it had to be a joke right? I mean, we the students don’t pay six grand a semester to be taught completely by our fellow peers right?
Yaaaaaa-no.
As mentioned above, the ENVE 330 Field Sampling and Techniques course was overhauled such that students will be teaching the course for the rest of the semester. This is done to develop the presentation skills for the students.
As human beings, let alone engineers, it’s absolutely essential to develop proper communication and speaking abilities. We design stuff, and we have to then communicate this stuff to the people who will make this stuff. If we can’t properly get our ideas from our heads to our mouths then to people’s ears, we’ll end up with the engineering equivalent of Tiger’s apology speech: an utterly, epically huge fail. We need to be able to communicate, I get that, but at the expense of an entire semester? That’s just bologna. And I hate bologna.
Let’s start with the most glaringly huge redflag: Money. I don’t know exactly what the average tuition is for an engineering student here at UW, but for this Spring semester, I paid $5900. For arguments sake, let’s just assume that the average tuition cost is $5900. Now, lets look at the number of courses a student here will take. I’m taking five, so once again lets say for the sake of our argument that everyone else does too. Now, bear with me here, but if I do some heavy calculations, utilize some MATLAB skills… carry the one… find the determinant… That comes down to about $1180 per course. What if I was an international student? It would then probably be somewhere in the $346,532 per course range. If I was a student in that course, I would be livid. Stupid livid. I’d be Heidi Montag livid after she realized that nobody liked her new face. We are not paying that much money to be taught by fellow undergraduate students.
Let’s say I’m the kind of person who comes from a background where money just spews out of my tushy. What’s $1180? Fine. If anybody is going to tell me that the quality of teaching is going to be better because the student-teacher can better relate to the kids, you’re smoking some of that devil’s cabbage. Teaching is not easy. Try having enough information to cover a 50 minute lecture let alone a THREE hour one. It’s tough stuff. It comes from practice. How many of us have had some brutal profs? More so than the good ones right? And the profs probably have some more experience than a group of engineering students. Because of the fact that there will be a new student group ever lecture, there will be zero consistency. It’s going to be all over the place and it will have no flow.
The argument that this course is easy, and that this course can get away with an entire semesters worth of student-teachers begs the question: what academic merit does this class have? What is it doing in our curriculum? What does it say about the credentials of the contents of the course if it can get away with NINE weeks of nothing but student-teachers? I know that not every course has to be brutally hard, but what does it say about our curriculum if there exists a course that’s so non-chalant, so shallow in substance that it can be taught with no greater knowledge of the subject itself? The last time there was a course so weak we had designated an entire task force to overhaul the bloody thing.
Look, communication and presentation skills are absolutely vital for anybody who wishes to do well in their careers, both academic and professional, but to devote what amounts to basically an entire semester of this student-teacher lectures comes at the expense of the other crucial aspect of our careers: The academics.
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