Question

Do you feel that you have learned more about your academic preparedness following this course to be successful in GE and into your academic core courses? Please provide specific examples.

Answer 1

Ans) The quick exercise may help to put GE in perspective: Think of all the skills you have needed for the various jobs or roles you have held in your life and eliminate all the ones tied to your major or discipline.

- Skills that come to mind might include technological abilities, writing, organizing, prioritizing, working alone and together, understanding complicated documents such as a human resources manual, a ballot, or a medical prescription, parenting, patience, communicating with someone from another place, planning a sprinkler system, navigating workplace cultures, and so on.

- Now think about where you learned these skills. In many cases, the answer may well be that you learned them in a general education class. For another exercise, think of three skills you obtained in your GE classes that you routinely use today. I remember a food-science preparation course, one about folklore of the Great Plains, and a biology class that continue to influence decisions that I make about my life. Of all the GE courses I took, I use Spanish the most, though I enjoyed music appreciation the most.

- Other exercises might also help to remind us of why our own experiences as students in general education courses were valuable. Because I teach mathematics, I will use it in the following example. Write a list of some key words from mathematics that students and colleagues use every day and without which understanding other disciplines becomes more challenging.

- The following words all originate from the study of math: symmetry, graph, radius, dependent, function, system, factor, variable, parallel, rate, equivalent, elliptical, spherical, volume, dimension, independent, linear, and proportional.

- Many faculty members from other disciplines use these words in their every-day lectures, and they often do so without thinking because they expect students to know and use a college-level vocabulary, and often they expect students to understand the mathematical definition and application of these words.

- Teachers of art, political science, geography, and many other subjects use "radius" within the context of their disciplines. The mathematics courses that students take provide a foundation for them to understand the content of other courses. While many of these words may have different meanings across disciplines, the result of using the words in multiple classes is that student learning is reinforced and students begin to build understanding for what they have learned in one class and how to apply it in another.