As an adviser to a dozen freshmen and sophomores, I get to play a small role in planning the academic lives of students. Each quarter, I leaf through the course offerings, marveling at the range of choices and sympathizing with those who just can't make up their minds. Masterpieces of American Literature or The Rise of Modern Japan? Economics of the Environment or Law and Morality? Film Criticism or Planetary Exploration? Ah, to be 19 and undeclared -- never mind all those midterms and finals.
A few months ago, we advisers were briefed on a Stanford pilot program. The Science, Mathematics, Engineering Core proposes a new way to teach techie topics to "fuzzies" -- students who don't plan to major in math or the hard sciences and, truth be told, don't much care for the subjects. For years -- decades, really -- these sorts of students have tiptoed through their course requirements as if navigating a minefield, trying to avoid anything that might bore, intimidate or require a deep understanding of material they believed would be useless the day after the final.
I know because I was one of those kids. As a freshman in 1981, I wondered how I would meet what were then the requirements in Areas 7, 8 and 9. I had taken calculus in high school but had dropped science after my sophomore biology class. (The fetal pigs we dissected turned me off to science -- and to ham.) So here I was at Stanford, trying to find science courses that would satisfy the registrar if not my own academic interests. I ended up taking introductory petroleum engineering, introductory statistics and -- I am not making this up -- a three-unit offering called Physics for Poets. The main text included a chapter titled "E=MC2 and All That." At the top of the syllabus, the professor -- in a futile effort to dumb down the subject -- had written:
Twinkle, twinkle little vector
How I wonder what's your sector.
A few years before me, contributing writer Joan Hamilton had also taken Stat 60 to satisfy her math requirement. On the day of the final, to give herself that extra edge, she borrowed her roommate's calculator, a state-of-the-art model from Hewlett-Packard. But Hamilton, '83, wasn't state-of-the-art herself and couldn't figure out how to use the thing. "The final was mind-boggling enough," recalls Hamilton. "And I've got this calculator that won't take let me type in two plus two to get four. I sat there in a complete panic." The instructor eventually took pity, lending Hamilton a "calculator for idiots" and giving her extra time to complete the test.
Hamilton went on to a career at Business Week, where she became a science writer. That made her an ideal reporter for this issue's cover story on Stanford's new way to teach science to non-science types. What Hamilton found was a fascinating experiment in pedagogy. Rather than take three unrelated courses just to meet requirements, students in the Science Core enroll in a single track -- focusing on earth, light or the heart -- and get a holistic approach to how science, math and engineering shape our everyday world. For example, in The Heart: Principles of Life Systems, the faculty draws on the core precepts of physics, chemistry, biochemistry, biology, epidemiology, genetics and electrical engineering.
To Hamilton, the teaching experiment has great appeal. "It was only after I left Stanford and became a science writer that I appreciated that the beauty of science was understanding how things work together," she says. "The new Science Core could motivate students to tackle subjects that otherwise seem intimidating."
As for my advisees, there's only one suggestion I give them that I'm certain is sound: seek variety. Mix up your coursework with classes from different disciplines; balance a reading-intensive class with one that has problem sets; devote some time to nonacademic interests. We try to follow that advice in the pages of the magazine. The mix in this issue includes, as usual, a bit of everything: a profile of tennis supercoach, a piece on the dearth of female faculty at Stanford, the winning entry in our annual fiction contest and a story on Charles Schwab's struggles with dyslexia. Along with the science story and 14 pages of campus news in Farm Report, there's something, I hope, for techies, fuzzies -- and everyone in between.
You can send e-mail to Bob at bobcohn@leland.stanford.edu
