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Re: grade-grubbing vs. love of learning

I wrote
>
> * I'm sad to hear that your student's love of learning has been
> extinguished, with so few exceptions.
>
> * I'm sad to hear that their parents, with few exceptions, will only pay
> for "safe" courses rather than for advanced courses where the student will
> learn more at the risk of a lower grade. Ditto for extracurricular
> activities.


And in reply at 10:45 AM 1/6/00 -0500, Richard W. Tarara wrote:

I think we delude ourselves if we think this is not the way it's been for
some time now.

Hmmmm. One person's reality is another person's delusion.

How many of us, when we had a free elective (I had only two
in my undergraduate days), really took a 'challenging' course--for the sake
of knowledge.

That sounds like a rhetorical question, implying that few of "us"
did. Well, some of us did. And at some schools, there still exist
students who do so.

Indeed, there are entire schools whose very existence argues against the
notion that students always choose good grades rather than choosing
challenging courses: anybody who is getting Bs at MIT could get As
somewhere else.

some will
take courses to really try and learn something they are interested in
(outside their major)--but that is VERY seldom physics.

It depends on the school. I notice that at saintmarys.edu, according to
the online version of the course schedule, no organized elective courses in
physics were even offered last semester. I'm sure that at other places,
both the demand and the supply are higher.

===================

All of this is not to say that there are _no_ students
really turned on by learning (I get a few--far too few)

Several people on this list have expressed what seems like an extreme
position on the significance of grades and the duty of students to get good
grades.

I have to wonder whether this position is part of the problem, part of the
reason why there are "too few" students willing to sign up for a
challenging elective.