A typical semester courseload is cognitive overload
It feels weird to just write a blog post. I’d just like to say* that I realize things are entirely not normal, and what makes it even more abnormal is how so many of us are expected go about our business as if things were normal.
The last time I was a student taking a full set of classes on the semester system, I was a high school senior. Where I went to college, a full course load was only three classes at a time. Even though my job is to (sometimes) teach courses on the semester system, it’s nothing I’ve experienced as an undergraduate.
A full semester course load is considered to be 15 units. Without any labs involved, that’s five three-unit courses. Holy crap, that’s a lot. I don’t mean that it’s a lot of work, per se, but it’s a lot to think about at the same time. Imagine taking a class in cell biology, one in sculpture, another one in Latin American Literature, and another in physics. And having to wrap your head around all of these all in the span of a few days. That’s a lot of cognitive whiplash! (And that’s only four courses I listed!)
Is this really the way we should be doing things? Is college best designed so that students have their attention divided so much?
The semester system is an extreme of disarray.
At the other extreme is the Block System. I’m aware of a couple places in the US that do this: Colorado College and Cornell College. At these campuses, you take one class at at time — full time — for just shy of 3 weeks. Then you get a few days rest, and then start a new block. Each class has a semester’s worth of material, but packed like jam into a glass jar. I can imagine this might make O Chem pretty difficult (and even if you call it orgo, which will always sound off to me), but imagine the things you can do when you’re dedicated to one class and nothing else.
In light of the pandemic, some institutions that normally teach in semesters are switching to a demi-block schedule, in which the semester is divided in half, and you only take two classes at a time. The one that I can name off the top of my head that is doing this is Albion College, but I’m pretty sure there are others.
And then there are schools that have been doing a similar thing for good long while. These are institutions that run on the schedule of the quarter system (having separate 10-week Fall, Winter, and Spring terms), but put a semester’s worth of work into those terms, and students are only expected to take three classes at a time. I did this when I was an undergrad. My first year of college, I had five hours of general biology lecture per week, 9am-10am for all three terms. And that was three semester’s worth of general biology. They shifted to the Semester system shortly after I graduated, but there are a bunch of institutions that are still doing this. The ones I know of include: Carleton College, College of The Atlantic, Kalamazoo College, and Lawrence University.
I have to say, I really liked not having to focus on more than three classes at a time. What seems special about being in college is that you get to dive into material just to learn, but if your time and your mind is so divided among other things (not to mention everything going on in life beyond academics), how can you really learn?
Learning takes work. While there are lots of folks out there trying to sell you some kind of get-education-quick strategy, the bottom line is that if you’re getting something out of a class, that means you’re putting something into it. This might not come in the form of filling out stacks of worksheets, or writing 100 pages of essays, or solving a jazillion problem sets, but nonetheless, genuine learning means genuine work. But that doesn’t mean we have to learn everything in parallel. Why can’t we learn in serial?
I started thinking about this after seeing how some high schools have changed their schedules to do online learning more gently. For example, some schools are set up so that only three classes meet per day. Synchronous sessions are interspersed with time for asynchronous learning. This sounds like a lot more humane, and also it provides greater opportunity for learning.
A lot of educators and institutions are adopting practices to lower stress and address equity issues that are exacerbated by the pandemic. Maybe they’ll realize that taking steps to reduce stress and support student learning are helpful all the time, even without a pandemic?
While the people who killed Emmett Till actual were charged with murder, the police who murdered Breonna Taylor in her own bed will not be experiencing consequences just got away with it. And pandemic is stretching out ad infinitum, our President is pulling out every stop to rig this election that his enablers let him get away with, and massive climate-change driven fires have swept the west coast. I’m personally exhausted, even though I’m so much more insulated than others, so getting through the day must be so much harder for folks who are bearing the brunt of these impacts. And I’m still getting paid for my day job, and when I have to email somebody, I have no idea how to even acknowledge the horribleness of All Of This before attempting to move on to items of business. Yet, somehow, the day must be negotiated. With all that in mind, here’s a post about something that’s been on my mind, about another way school can just be overwhelming.