Read this great atricle from Inside Higher Ed about how we need to stop mollycoddling college students who (like me) think that math is hard...
- ... Admissions officers and student tour guides go out of their way to reassure prospective students that they won’t be expected to complete rigorous major-level science classes, but will be provided with options more to their liking.
It’s difficult to imagine similar accommodations being made for students uncomfortable with other disciplines. The expectations for student ability in the humanities are much higher than in the sciences. If a student announced that he or she was not comfortable with reading and analyzing literary texts, we would question whether that student belonged in college at all (and rightly so). We take the existence of “Physics for Poets” for granted, but nobody would consider advocating a “Poetry for Physicists” class for science majors who are uncomfortable with reading and analyzing literature.
The disparity in expectations goes well beyond simple literacy. I was absolutely stunned to hear a colleague suggest, to many approving nods, that all first-year students should be required to read The Theory Toolbox. We would never consider asking all entering students to read H. M. Schey’s Div, Grad, Curl, and All That: An Informal Text on Vector Calculus, even though the critical theory described in The Theory Toolbox is every bit as much a specialized tool for literary analysis as vector calculus is a specialized tool for scientific analysis. Yet faculty members in the humanities can seriously propose one as essential for all students in all disciplines, while recoiling from the other....
via Backwards City, who also links to this amazing page of US maps broken down by religion.
