Hard

It is my habit to bring my Google Nexus Tablet to the breakfast table to read the day’s news.   Sometimes, I plug in my headphones to listen to some morning music (Dave Grusin, maybe, or Keiko Matsui) and watch a few news videos.   The world has changed and perhaps there’s no better way to see it than to look at a few of Norman Rockwell’s paintings of the breakfast table.
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Take, for example, Behind the Newspaper, in which the neglected wife stares longingly into space while her husband’s attention is buried in the morning paper.  These days?  He’s got a tablet in front of him, a smartphone in his hands and Bose noise cancelling headphones.  Don’t worry.  Muri and I are very different morning people, so she’s never the spurned wife.  At breakfast, anyway.  Or consider Breakfast Table Political Argument.  Today’s version: dueling iPads with junior completely distracted from his parents argument by his Mom’s iPhone (he’s texting little Suzie down the street about their play date later).

Yes, I digress.  And sometimes regress.  This morning I found an article on the the Wall Street Journal website with the intriguing title, Math, Science Popular Until Students Realize They’re Hard.  A study done by the National Bureau of Economic Research at two liberal arts colleges found that, college students are fleeing from math, physics, chemistry and the like after dipping into some classes.  According to the article, Todd R. Stinebrickner, one of the researchers, said, Students knew science was hard to begin with, but for a lot of them it turned out to be much worse than what they expected.   What they didn’t expect is that even if they work hard, they still won’t do well.  Now I just love this: The researchers said that if more science graduates are desired, the findings suggest the importance of policies at younger ages that lead students to enter college better prepared to study science.

Let me take you back fifty years to my orientation at Stevens Institute of Technology.  Several hundred Freshman are packed into the auditorium and the Dean of Engineering is addressing us.   Look at the student on your left, he said.  Now look at the student on your right.  After a pregnant pause, he added, Both of them will be gone by the end of the semester.    I struggled for my grades as a Freshman (OK, that was partly because I pledged a fraternity and didn’t study enough, but that’s another post).  Maybe Todd Stinebrickner is right, part of the problem is lack of preparation.  But science and math are innately Hard, even if you are prepared.  Shortly before graduation, my roommate, Jon, who was a straight-A marketing major said to me, I always thought you were crazy taking engineering.  By that time I was courting my wife-to-be and had slipped to a solid-C student.  But now you have half a dozen job offers and I have none, Jon continued.  The point isn’t that engineering is better than marketing, just that some things that are Hard are worth working for.   Perhaps that’s what our policies at younger ages need to emphasize.

One more curmudgeonly rant and I’ll close.  This week, on The Art of Being Conflicted, Cheryl wrote about a study that found that babies don’t like to see other babies to cry.  Hello?  Hasn’t anyone else noticed how often when one baby cries in Target another joins in?  We don’t need a study to figure out that babies don’t like to see other babies cry.  Or one to tell us that science is Hard and some students don’t want to work.  I have a suggestion.  To all National Agencies with grant money to spend studying social issues: Send me the money and I’ll tell you what you want to know.  In a blog post.  The next day.  It’s not Hard.

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Tags: curmudgeonly rants, engineering, humor, math, perspectives, postaday2011, science

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