Educational evolution
Commenter “Mike” quotes me in a previous post, and adds his reaction:
“In high school we were assigned to read Crime and Punishment, as well as the “Grand Inquisitor” excerpt from Karamazov, and in college I read his chilling work The Demons (then titled The Possessed), about the spiritual and moral bankruptcy of the revolutionaries.”
Need we say more about how the Liberal Thugs have captured and destroyed out once esteemed education system?
Well, I’ll say a bit more, whether we need to or not.
Yes, the reading I was assigned in high school was heavy-duty, and this was at New York City public school. Our English department was especially rigorous. We had to read—and these are just a few examples that quickly come to mind—The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick, much of Shakespeare (plays and sonnets), Sophocles and Plato and a full year-long survey course of English literature and poetry beginning with Beowulf and ending with T. S. Eliot, as well as a similar year-long survey of American literature.
There were no special interest groups involved. Women, for example, were there if they had earned their place (e. g. Dickinson, Bronte). And a lot of the poetry had to be memorized.
On top of that, in twelfth grade we were required to write a paper a week, in which we were asked to analyze a work of literature and answer some sort of thought question about it. There was no way to research the answer, which could not be found in our texts or in the library (at least not easily, in those pre-internet days). We had to think—to develop an idea and defend it with evidence from the text of the novel or poem. And we had to do it again and again and again with many different works of literature, until it became easier.
Quite a few of our teachers were old even back then, and since I’m no youngster, that means they were from another era entirely. You didn’t mess with them, and if you did your parents would mess with you.
But—
I will also add that I was in honors classes and then AP classes. When I had first arrived at that high school I was put into the “regular” academic classes (there was a non-academic track, too, where the kids were pretty much warehoused and were fairly serious discipline problems, although not by today’s standards) and therefore I had experienced what the non-honors classes were like. The fare there was not that difficult at all, although I believe it was still quite a bit harder than today’s equivalent assignments.
In our AP classes (ordinarily in the last year of high school) we were also required—and expected to pass—the AP exams to get college credit. I’ve heard from a teacher friend of mine recently that in quite a few schools today this is not true, and that “AP” has often become a designation that just means “the smarter kids take this class.”
When I was in school this high school system was preceded by a grade school track system, although not one set in stone. A child could move back and forth among the tracks, although in practice it didn’t happen all that often because each child was usually fairly consistent in performance. But everyone knew which class had the smart kids and which the “dumb” kids, even though the school didn’t call them that but used a rather transparent system of number designations instead.
Much of that changed—just as “Mike” says—a little while after I got out of school. I heard about the changes rather than experiencing them, but I remember being horrified because I knew how bored the higher-achieving kids would almost have to be if placed in a system in which they were not challenged. But I guess I wasn’t all that smart, either, because back then I didn’t understand that this was in large measure a politically motivated move rather than just some random and arbitrary educational vogue.
Now, of course, I understand better. And now we’ve had decades of it, although some remnants of the track system still remain (and of course, those reportedly-dumbed-down AP classes). These days, though, many of the young people who would have been in those public school honors classes of yesteryear have fled to private schools. Many of the kids who remain are embedded in a culture that does them no favors academically, with parents who no longer know how to supervise and guide them even should they want to. My own parents weren’t especially hands-on with my schoolwork, except on rare occasions. But they didn’t have to be, because the environment as a whole encouraged working hard.
I took an AP Humanities course in high school – literature, history, art , and music. The English/literature class focused a lot on comparative religion.
The music classes were excellent. “Those who can’t, teach”- not in this case, as the music teacher had played in one of the Dorsey brothers’ big bands.
The teacher for the English/literature classes knew his stuff and had well-prepared lectures, even if he had the charisma of a dead fish. He also had learned Chinese while in the Army, and had worked at translating Chinese Air Force radio transmissions, so you knew he was smarter than the average bear. Just not someone you wanted to sit next to at a dinner party.
But the history teacher was a disaster. He had been assigned the class when the former AP teacher got promoted to an administrative job. His specialty was American History, so he needed to do some brushing up to prepare lectures on Ancient and Medieval History. He apparently didn’t want to spend the time to prepare lectures. In one sense, I can’t blame him. He was in his 40s with a family, and didn’t want to burn himself out by working until 11 at night preparing lectures. So we got “discussion” classes which in retrospect seemed to focus more on current events than on the subject at hand.
While he worked us hard, assigning papers which he admitted to grade while watching football games on TV, it was apparent that unlike the other teachers, he didn’t work hard himself. That was demoralizing.
In my subsequent university classes and work experience, I have never again been subjected to being required to work my tail off when the person assigning me the work is a slacker. Only in that AP History class. For that I should count myself fortunate.
Not all the lessons are in the books, papers, or exams.
It sounds like my high school was nowhere near as rigorous as yours, but in some ways I learned more in high school than in college. I had many teachers whose habits of mind and moral example I came to appreciate greatly, years later of course. So thank you, Oblates of St. Francis de Sales! By the time I got to college (1967), things were deteriorating rapidly.
I as in high school in the early 80s. We had tracking done in our lower grades, and the honors classes held the smart kids in HS. I honestly don’t recall if we had AP classes – if so, I wasn’t taking them, but I had a different experience in HS.
I am envious of your experience. I never felt particularly challenged.
Due to an illness, I had to take a regular American History class instead of the Honors one. I could have slit my wrists and bled out. It was AWFUL.
A college friend of mine who now works for a university and is a GLBT (or whatever) activist heavily into diversity and leftism had told me in college that she thought tracking was bad for everyone. Instead, the smarter kids should share knowledge and help the less bright ones learn. Even then I knew that was a crock. Besides my Am Hist experience, our honors science classes were messed up. Bio Hon was a freshman taking biology instead of waiting until sophomore year, and taking Chem as a sophomore, and so forth.
I ended up sitting in the back row, with several sophomore guys. Needless to say, they all got As. Same experience in Am Hist – lots’ of guys near me got As. Someone like my friend would look at that and think that the ‘knowledge sharing’ approach looked. The commenters here won’t make that mistake.
Their As cost me nothing – I was entertained – got some social benefits out of it, and they were happy to do so well. It would have been better for me to have been challenged with other smart people. But leftists don’t think that way – they prefer to believe their own stupid ideas.
I’ve always strongly thought that society would do better putting a lot of effort into their smartest kids. Instead, they choose to waste money and effort on those who don’t want to learn, or can’t. As it stands, I find the money poured into some special ed programs deplorable, having dated a special ed teacher who had to ‘educate’ kids who couldn’t even function. He told me of one event related to geometry (or using tools, I can’t remember) where they used one minimally functioning girl to function as a ruler on the ground. You cannot make this stuff up.
In my rural OH high school in the 70s, we didn’t have regular honors or AP classes. My freshman year, the principal decided to teach an honors Algebra class. We went through both the Algebra I and II books. Then one parent complained that it wasn’t fair, so it was done away with. My sophomore year, we went back into the regular class and repeated the same Algebra II book.
Now my son is in 6th grade in PA. He’s getting straight As and bored, while still having time to write stories and essays about baseball players in his spare time during class. In 3rd grade I asked for him to be tested for gifted, which he missed by 2 points, with a test weighted toward processing speed. He is slow and methodical and wasn’t told that he was being timed. I went into the school armed with data and studies showing that that test wasn’t accurate, but to no avail. It was quite clear that they didn’t want him to be gifted. His school has gifted (3-4 in each grade) special needs (same ratio) and everyone else. No honors, no AP.
I asked his teachers to give him more of a challenge, so last year his math teacher had him helping another boy, which is not what I meant. So now he’s reading Ronald Reagan’s autobiography and Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell when he’s done with the regular work.
The only private schools near here are religious, and not geared toward academics. He says he’d feel isolated doing cyber school. We tried homeschooling briefly, but I work full time and couldn’t give him the time that we both wanted. So he gets the basics at school with me filling in with more challenging books and subjects. And we live in what is considered the best school district in the area.
A wealthy friend sent her daughter to private school in a nearby city. She’s an English professor and was helping with our homeschool curriculum. She sent me a link to an all-boys private school so that I could get their reading list. Class size was 8-10, hands on labs, etc. The tuition was $17,000. The sad thing is that PA spends almost that much per pupil. But I’m guessing that kids like my son get very little of that and the special needs kids get much more. Each one has a full-time aid that accompanies him or her around all day. They disrupt class and some of them are truly disabled. Once my son didn’t finish a Math test because one of the girls kept jumping on his back. The teacher didn’t stop this, but marked his unfinished questions wrong. Today, all of the money and attention goes to a small minority of the pupils. The public schools are well and truly broken.
http://minx.cc/?post=338301
But I don’t even trust the school system to track properly at this point. See above Sarah Hoyt’s experience.
I took AP courses, which were not that difficult (so in fact they did represent college courses!) I was never really challenged in high school or college, but at least in high school I was forced to study a diversity of subjects. Law school was really the only rigorous academic program I participated in, and even then, it was really just a year or rigor, followed by indifference, followed by malaise.
I graduated from high school with enough college credit to be a second semester sophomore, but I stayed 4 years b/c I was on scholarship. (But enough about me, let’s talk about me.)
The prison model of schools needs to end. It makes zero sense to silo really good teachers when their lessons and methods could be broadcast by webinar. I am envisioning pods of small groups (who may meet up for larger groups every so often), led by journeymen teachers that follow up to the main lesson. Sort of a hybrid homeschooling method with the superstar teacher being webcast in. Pay that person a lot of money for a tournament style system (and not run by the schools, as voted upon by parents). But of course, that would take away a lot of control and would allow for tailoring studies to actually meet the needs/level of the students. Can’t have that. Go through the meat grinder, children.
Or yeah, See Lisa M’s experience above. That is truly frightening. But you’re right to challenge your son on your own. The schools are geared towards the middle 50%, and that’s it. That is how they are rewarded. And they get federal money for disabled kids, so there’s that too.
I was just remembering that, sophomore year in high school, we also had to read Melville’s long short stories: “The Encantadas,” “Bartleby the Scrivener,” “Billy Budd,” and “Benito Cereno.”
I would find them challenging today. As high school sophomores, you can imagine how difficult we found them. I also happen to remember an essay question from an exam in that class on Bartleby. Those of you who have read the story might appreciate this: “Explain the final line of the story–‘Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!'”
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
And I recommend the story, which can be found online here. Even though I didn’t quite understand it when I first read it, I definitely liked it.
Some school districts delayed the changes until quite recently. My oldest daughter was in the Talented and Gifted track in both San Diego and Corvallis, OR during the 80s-90s. She took every AP class available in High School and entered Oregon State in 1995 as a Sophomore.
In high school in 1970, my AP English teacher let us select books to study. For some reason, I picked Joyce Cary’s “The Horse’s Mouth”. The central character is an artist who (minor plot point) sold a painting that he’s trying to get back. That year the AP essay required you to analyze a work in which some object plays a key role. Most of my classmates ended up writing about The Scarlet Letter; I wrote about The Horse’s Mouth. I imagine my AP grader was relieved to see something different.
In AP US History, I did research on John L. Lewis and the labor movement. I was able to re-use that paper in college. I’ve heard of people re-using college papers in multiple courses, but it wasn’t that common for high school work to be applicable to college. They worked us pretty hard in high school back then.
Concerning Melville’s Encantadas, I just read that a few months ago! After finally reading Moby Dick as an adult, I’ve been asking a friend who’s a serious Melville fan for further recommendations. This is a fun read; worth checking out.
JuliB, “He told me of one event related to geometry (or using tools, I can’t remember) where they used one minimally functioning girl to function as a ruler on the ground. You cannot make this stuff up.”
The length of the bridge crossing the Charles River from Cambridge to Boston at M.I.T. is measured as 365 Smoots plus one quarter. One night a bunch of fraternity guys got drunk and laid one of their brothers, who was too drunk to walk, end-to-end from one end of the bridge to the other. If you walk across the bridge you can still see the marks that have been maintained for over fifty years.
^There is an MIT grad at Google who inserted Smoots into Google Maps (or Google Earth). One of those.
I lucked out, I guess – I was in the high-achiever, honors and AE (academic enhanced) track in high school, in the public schools in Los Angeles from 1969-1972. There was a circle of us, all bright and nerdy, who had the same classes, and staked out the same table in the lunchroom every day. And because the LA school district still tracked students then, we all had the benefit of good teachers and fairly challenging material. Once or twice, by some kind of oversight or scheduling conflict, I wound up in a regular class, and I swear, I could have died of boredom. It was horrible, just having to regurgitate the answers to the questions at the end of the chapter to a bored and dispirited teacher. The only good that I got out of those classes was that some of the tough kids respected the hell out of me because I did know the answers and I would help them quietly. I also thought at the time that expecting everyone to go to college was a total waste. Many student’s skills and inclination just didn’t lead that way. They’d have been better off tracked into an apprenticeship program after about 14 or 15.
These days, I tell my daughter that when she has children, I will home-school them myself. Even in the better school districts, middle and high-school is a snakepit.
Neo, of the Melville stories, my sophomore English class did only Billy Budd. The story stuck with me. Even though I had no enthusiasm for English classes, the teacher that year must have been doing something right, because I vividly recall Billy Budd and his talking about the green light in Gatsby.
Your relating writing a paper a week in your AP English class was similar to my experience. Fortunately, we didn’t have to do it for the whole year.
The teacher did provide a loophole, which a lot of students – not I – took advantage of. If you read a work in its original non-English language, you had two weeks instead of one to write the paper. Which meant that several French students read Camu’s The Stranger in English- only 150 pages or so- and took two weeks to do it.
My tiny parochial HS didn’t offer any honors or AP classes (early 60s), so I never really had to work to get As. But I suffered a major shock in college when I got to calculus and organic chemistry. I just didn’t know how to study them. My grades dropped, and I suffered a real shock. I was scared away from science and switched to sociology. This was probably okay for me because I was interested in exploring the world and I probably didn’t have the kind of single mindedness needed to be succcessful in science. And I needed extra time to move from a shy, poorish small town girl to someone who had confidence in my own abilities.
But at least I got the basics in elementary and high school and was able to teach myself what I needed to learn later in life. All of my HS classmates have done OK too.
Circa 1970 the public schools stopped being where children go to get educated and began being where those with education degrees go to get lifetime employment with a smorgasboard of paid-for benefits. It’s also about the time they got unionized, which is no coincidence.
Neo – sounds like we had a similar high school experience. Except you didn’t mention NY state Regents testing. I remember having to study for those at the end of every year in order to go on to the next grade level. My grade school through high school years were in upstate NY and I exited the public school system in 76. I was placed in the “accelerated program” which is now called advance placement in most schools, and recall spending hours of frustrating study every day. Shakespeare, Melville, TS Eliot. And writing about it all.
I was probably over my head in some classes, but did well in others; back then it was all or nothing for the program – they didn’t do AP by subject in our district.
Anyway my kids got a decent dose of literature and math in our district here in TX, but it’s a good district and not all of them are good. Even so, the writing requirements in their AP classes are significantly different than what we went through. Sad to say, the things that would get a D or an F in our day, such as grammatical errors, incorrect sentence structure, and other problems , are almost completely overlooked by the AP English teachers. It’s hard to understand what they are thinking when they don’t correct glaring mistakes.
I would think this only makes their life tougher in college, assuming they are going for a serious degree, but maybe things have changed there too.
in my Bible study tonight, a couple ladies (one a new teacher) were staring out the window when I remarked that they needed ritalin if they kept it up.
Everyone laughed.
Then Bonnie, an elderly grandmother came in and during prayer requests, asked for prayer for her grandson who was extremely bright and kept getting in trouble in school from boredom.
How many times the nuns scolded me for that!
We all started talking about similar experiences.
Then to come home and read this.
I have often thanked God I went through public school when they were still using the track system. Our pod of about 30 top students was created after our 6th-grade achievement test scores: that was also the year they started the Academically Talented Summer Program (6th and 7th grades). We then went to all our classes together, except for gym — a disconcertingly demotic experience!
Location: North Carolina, small town. Years: 1966-1972. I went to a large junior high school, about 1800 students in grades seven through nine; our high school had 2000 students. Integrated, with ~ 30% black students and 70% white. All Protestants, or close enough. All natural-born Americans, or close enough. We used to get programs beamed in from the Research Triangle campuses by satellite, which were played back on the (early model) videotape machine.
Then we moved to a city in Tennessee with several posh private schools, and the public schools there were so bad (as a result) that my parents sent me to a Catholic high school. This was so much LESS demanding than my N.C. high school that I was resentful and rebellious. Got the Chemistry Medal from a teacher who would announce with an aggrieved air that “Beverly is busting the curve again, so your test grades will have to stand.” Any fool could have aced his Mickey Mouse tests. I used to put my feet on his desk. Never studied a lick. Once, when my lazy classmates were trying to cheat off my test, I got Smartgirl’s Revenge: I wrote answers I knew they could read, but in faint pencil wrote the correct answers — then with 10 minutes left, I went back and erased the wrong ones and wrote in the correct ones! I heard sotto voce cursing and furious erasing from behind me, but I shielded my paper.
See, not only were they stealing from me what they had no right to, they were stupidly cheating themselves. And lazy! my God, a baboon could have learned the material.
I didn’t get challenged intellectually until I hit college, and had a tough time in Zoology, in particular — it was the first hurdle for the pre-med students, and the professor was fiendishly tough (and a damn good teacher). I had no study habits; never needed them before. A chastening experience!
I have to say, too, that this idea that the bright kids should be kneecapped and forced to crawl at the pace of the stupid ones is cruel and inhumane, and any parent who allows this without raising absolute hell should be horsewhipped. The slowcoaches don’t enjoy it, either. And it doesn’t fool the kids: they still know who’s smart and who’s stupid.
Just more of the Malicious Envy the Left is so steeped in.
I’m pretty close to a contemporary of Neo, but grew up in an entirely opposite sort of environment: the rural and small-town South. My high school education certainly didn’t compare to NYC and AP courses, but looking back on it I think it was surprisingly good for the time and place. Judging from conversations with friends in college from similar backgrounds, it was better than average. We didn’t read as much as Neo, but we read things of equal quality. I took two years each of Latin and German (it was not a Catholic school, just a public high school, and Catholics were very few). Several of my teachers were outstanding. In particular my civics teacher had a huge influence on me: he was a conservative who did not hide his views but was thoroughly honest intellectually, and passionately loved his country. That didn’t stop me from going hippie, but after I got over that I came to appreciate his wisdom. I seriously wonder whether there are many voices like his in education today.
It seems to me that schools then were, overall, more serious about learning qua learning than they are now. In English classes, for instance, we studied real classics and didn’t spend time on questionable contemporary novels with an ideological slant.
I was a serious music student and wanted to leave the music department and go to a private music conservatory part time. My school forced me to stay in my music department because I was supposed to be a leader and a good example for the other students who never practiced and had no talent or interest in being a good musician. Music class for me was complete torture, surrounded by talentless clowns who just goofed around. But I was supposed to be there and help them be better. It had nothing to do with me becoming a good musician. I was there so the music teacher would have students so he could have a job. Complete baloney. I hate public school.
My 1-12 school years were traumatic.
My teachers found me intellectually so disturbing that each, in turn, had to write, and write, and write, and write — into my cumulative scholastic record. (aka ‘Cume.’)
By grade 11 my cume was the thickest in the Los Angeles Unified School District by inches. It was a special, ultra-expanding, file typically used in overwrought divorce cases.
I know this because my HS counselor told me — and how he’d spent an ENTIRE weekend reading it. (!!!)
My 4th grade teacher was so obsessed with me that she had herself moved to the 5th grade class level — solely to stay ‘bonded’ to me. Anti-bonded would be more like it. She left me shaking with nightmares — a psychic dread only equaled by my NPD afflicted Mother. At one point I was physically disciplined for reading too fast. It irked her that I could read three to four times as fast as an adult (her) with comprehension.
I was regarded as seriously odd from the outset: profound NPD will have its effect. My 1st grade teacher thought it odd that I never wanted to go home.
Because of my parent’s bizarre opinions — too many to discuss — every recommendation that I be accelerated into more mentally demanding classes — like skipping two or three or four grades — was nixed.
Each teacher, in turn, played it forward so that the next ‘got it’ WRT Mom.
I was totally bored in 6th grade, having read through the (puny) school library; forced to retread material covered in my traumatic 5th grade. However, this particular teacher happened to be the best I ever had — and I did have some terrific teachers.
She restructured her classroom during the last two-weeks of the year — so that every child was at the perimeter — facing inward. Then, for her own curiosity (about onlyme) she staged a boys vs girls ‘GE College Bowl.’ She lifted queries from the show, apparently.
(FYI, it was a post-Sputnik Sunday broadcast show that pitted the best prep school students in the nation — with the victors getting GE scholarships. It’s the kind of stuff that Neo would’ve aced.)
Other than two opening ‘gifts’ to the girls team, by yours truly, the ‘contest’ was a one-boy blowout. The ‘game show’ devolved into a one-on-one quiz: just how deep into the stack could I go?
Pretty deep, was the answer.
The boys lifted me up out onto the playground in victory: boys were smarter than girls. It was passing strange, since I was easily the most unpopular boy in class.
Subsequently she told me the back round of the above — and that she’d written quite a bit into my cume. (Subsequent commentary revealed that her entry was epic. Every teacher was a buzz over it.) The gist: she thought that I was profoundly unchallenged — and that even as an autodidact seemed to function at 12th grade level — with a strong memory, to boot.
Her commentary triggered a written debate over the years resulting in a cumulative scholastic record 3 to four inches thick — requiring two maxi-folders to hold.
My counselor told me that it was a LOT of handwriting. He asked around, none of his peers had seen a cume even a third the size of mine. When he brought this up, I did not know what a cume was.
My sister became a teacher, and so I found out, it’s a big deal.
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On the whole “educating your peers” bit — I’ve posted a bit before. Not only did I have to self-educate — I ended up teaching classmates, my buddies and even my brother. (Family is always a tall order.)
I discovered that helping other is VERY dangerous, that to do so ruins your popularity.
These days, I just let people walk into walls and fall off cliffs. As you might imagine, I’ve never been more popular.
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As for AP Calculus: that’s where and when I met Miss Robbins — of ice cream fame. She’d give me a lift to the nearby JC. What a cruise.
I’ll never forget the Sylmar earthquake — when Miss Robbins drove us back from JC down Ventura Blvd — at a snails pace. Her IH had no synchros between 1st and 2nd. So she had to stop — fully — to get back down into first. Being a four-wheel machine — 1st was ultra low — causing her to shift up into 2nd… to roll another two car lengths… Upon which she’d have to stop completely. It was too much of a beast to start out in 2nd gear, of course.
B&R was already a big deal in the Valley before 1970… Who knew that it’d go national. IIRC Miss Robbins inherited ownership. It’s a small world after all.
Wow, Neo, your high school curriculum looks much like what I was taught at Moscow linguistic university at English literature courses – from Beowulf to Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens and Eliot. How it happened that from this in one generation the education slipped to 80% functional illiteracy rate of graduates of NY public schools?
Beverly
And it [not tracking] doesn’t fool the kids: they still know who’s smart and who’s stupid.
In my days as a substitute teacher, I once substituted at a school where the two fifth grade teachers had taken the initiative to split the fifth graders into more capable and less capable classes.[Woe to them if Central Office found out about it!] The fifth graders were given no more information about why the classes had been grouped than to simply say that “You have been assigned to Mrs. Smith’s class.”
It didn’t take the kids long to figure out which was the dumb class, and which was the smart class, even though the teachers had given them no information about why they had been placed in a given class.
In our AP classes (ordinarily in the last year of high school) we were also required–and expected to pass–the AP exams to get college credit
I earned an entire semester’s worth of college credit that way. It was a heck of a lot cheaper than paying for it in college.
Speaking of HS, I took a class in English literature (pre-1900) during my junior year. My teacher lectured -a lot- and you had to take copious notes because anything that she said was testable, as was all of our reading. Hardest class I took in high school and I’m including AP physics and calculus. Heck, my AP English class was easier.
I agree that the Melville short stories require some effort, but they are worth it, especially, “The Piazza”.
I graduated in 2005 and at that time (and I think still today) the AP courses are designed to train you for the college-credit qualifying exams at the end of the year…but you are not required to take them. All of my courses were AP – math, English, sciences, foreign language, music, history – but I only took two AP exams. Although, for my foreign language and math I received credit from an online community college. A few of the AP classes were set up to enable that, and though you could possibly get more credits from a high score on the exam, the community college credits were ensured.
Also, I didn’t have to try at all in my classes. They didn’t seem dumbed down (that I would know of) but they definitely didn’t expand my mind/thinking. The only courses I remember having to work and try in were Physics and Chemistry (both taught by the same excellent teacher).