“When am I ever going to use this?”

We have all heard (and possibly even said) this in class at one time or another.

In my high school math classes, this was a constantly repeated phrase. We spend countless hours each year learning complex equations and ways to manipulate numbers—stuff only rocket scientists ever use, right?

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if we knew why we were learning these things.

I recently had a chance to talk to one of my professors about teaching and learning. Why do teachers teach the way they do? Why do we learn what we learn?

It seems as though students are fed a continuous stream of information, only to regurgitate it on a test to demonstrate their knowledge.

In thinking about our discussion, I have concluded education is like a big fish net, cast into the sea with hopes of catching massive numbers of fish. Classes are likewise designed to target large schools of fish — in this case, students. This is exemplified by the lecture hall in Dabney with the nosebleed section, requiring students to bring binoculars to see the chalkboard. The educational superiors cast the biggest net possible by creating a curriculum that, supposedly, can reach the most students.

Reaching as many students as possible can be a good thing, and it can be a bad thing.

On one hand, it is good, as it allows institutions to offer fewer sections of a course, which means fewer faculty members need to be hired.  This correlates to lower tuition, thus more Cook-Out funds for starving college students.

On the other hand, targeting a larger audience means the material has much more breadth than depth to it. Concepts are generalized and only skimmed over lightly in class, so more material can be covered in a shorter time.

This creates problems, particularly in a university setting. In such an environment, students generally develop an idea of what material pertains to their major, and they tend to not want to learn something if they feel they will have no use for it.

I will admit, I am guilty of this mindset. I can’t even tell you how many times I have caught myself while sitting in my organic chemistry class wondering when I will ever need to know how to make 1,3-butadiene. I’m a food scientist, so I’m pretty sure I won’t need to synthesize rubber any time soon.

I would probably still be in this mindset, but one of my organic chemistry professors has changed my perspective on how I was learning the material for that class—and all of my classes for that matter.

He is one of the few professors who doesn’t believe in cramming material the night before and regurgitating it on the paper the next day.

Instead, he stressed the importance of the learning process. He knew that in ten years—or maybe even the next semester—we would never remember any of the reactions he taught and why they were important, unless we had to use them for a job.

We would, however, remember how we had to put the concepts together to analyze and create new knowledge from the tools we were given in class. You may know this as the highest level of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

From that class, I took away this lesson: knowing how to learn information is a concept that will prove to be more useful than the material we are learning in class. The process of synthesizing information and knowing how to use the tools our professors put in our toolboxes is something which can be applied to any level of any discipline.

The next time you find yourself frustrated in class wondering why you are learning something, hang in there.  Just learn how to learn.