Tuesday, March 10, 1998
It’s time to look beyond the numbers
EDUCATION: There are no formulas, equations to solve life’s
problems
I have never been that fond of numbers. Maybe my aversion is
rooted in failed fifth-grade long division quizzes. Or it could
even be that almost all of my academic success revolves around
convincing professors I know a bunch of things that I don’t. This,
by the way, is a skill that can occasionally get you through a
philosophy essay exam but pretty much leaves you screwed when the
teacher reaches for the Scantron. (And is it just me, or did the
professors here devise some sort of Ivy League multiple guess test
to confuse you so much that by the end of the question, you not
only forget what they’re asking, but if someone were to ask you
your name, you’d stutter "… Bob …?"
"The answer is
1)A
2)B
3)C
4)C&A’s
5)Sometimes B but never A unless C and B add up to less than
D
6)D
7)A,E,I,O,U and sometimes Y
8)None of the above, but all of everything else."
I think Jack Handey said it best in one of his SNL musings:
"Instead of having ‘answers’ on a math test, they should just call
them ‘impressions,’ and if you got a different ‘impression,’ so
what, can’t we all be brothers?" Anyone want to take bets as to how
many math students blitz me derogatory comments concerning my
mother and animal husbandry after reading this paragraph?
But seriously, I do have a point here. Sort of. And even if
numbers by themselves may not be intrinsically evil, I definitely
think there’s something wrong with their paramount importance in
this country’s educational system. I know, I know, you’re all
thinking I should have gone to Brown, but well, my hair isn’t
orange, my body isn’t pierced in 37 different places, and where the
heck am I going to tan in Providence, huh? Anyway, this problem
seems to be most chronic in high schools, so it’s there I’ll focus
my rant.
Between ETS and GPAs and SATs and IQs, it seemed like everyone
was trying to quantify human worth and judge your intelligence on
the basis of a 4 digit number and a decimal point. Instead of
Daniel, they might as well have just called me 4.0173. My nickname
could have been the cosine of the tenth’s digit. Knowledge for the
sake of numbers. It didn’t matter if the numbers made sense or
seemed reasonable; all anyone wanted to know was if something was
on the test. And speaking of tests, most of the ones I took were
about three hours of work crammed into 43 minutes, which left you
no time to think about anything. God forbid your pencil should
break, because by the time you fished through your bag and found a
new one, everyone else was on page 7. This doesn’t measure how much
you know, but rather how fast you can scribble.
What’s worse is that this sort of system often reserves its
highest honors for those stressed out, obsessive folk who go home
every day after school, eat Fig Newtons, and do calculus problems
for five hours. You know, the kind of people who make flash cards
for gym class. I could be wrong, but I don’t think education is all
about memorization and pop quizzes. We should be trying to produce
people who are good at life, not just physics: People who are happy
and don’t shake in fear like an epileptic guinea pig every time
report cards are sent home. Because the truth is, you have to
figure out most of the important things in life on your own, for
yourself, without all those formulas you loaded into your
calculator. All the answers for life aren’t going to be found on
page 347 of your textbook.
Most of what’s important doesn’t happen in a classroom, either.
This may be good news for those of you who went to three Chem 10C
lectures before deciding sleep was a much better idea. OK, so now I
have "South Campus" in a frenzy, and my fellow Earthly Bruins in
praise. I should remind all of you, that I am in fact a "South
Campus" student myself, and it is perhaps from here that my rage
stems. I cannot fathom a physics test where in addition to a
problem set, it might be required of me to write what "E=MC2"
actually means. I do, however, acknowledge that this is not the
case for all professors. As a matter of fact, on a recent
statistics midterm, Professor Don Ylvisaker required that I not
only answer a complete statistical problem set, but that I also
respond, in paragraph form (a risky proposition for science
majors), to the validity of a medical study of his choosing.
Needless to say, I was impressed.
Here’s a thought from a wonderful little book called, "The Tao
of Pooh." (I definitely think it should be added to the high school
English canon. It can replace Tess of the D’ubervilles.):
"Knowledge and experience do not necessarily speak the same
language. But isn’t the knowledge that comes from experience more
valuable than the knowledge that doesn’t? It seems fairly obvious
to some of us that a lot of scholars need to go outside and sniff
around – walk through the grass, talk to the animals. That sort of
thing."
Ultimately, we all should try to look past the numbers and focus
on life, which education should enrich and inform, not
replace.Inlender is a second-year psychobiology student.