Freshman Seminars Remain Popular
Posted on January 3rd, 2006
(Source: Connecticut College)Econ 101, Poli Sci 101, Expository Writing and…The World of Reality TV? College freshmen these days have the opportunity to add offbeat seminars to their fare of standard courses. Some focus on rather whimsical topics, while others tackle more meaty issues. Consider the following from the AP:
For first-year students, they are kicking around some heady questions: Is there such thing as absolute mathematical truth? Can a perfect circle exist? What if two plus two didn't equal four?
The Connecticut College freshman seminar, like those at other schools, is built around an interdisciplinary topic—in this case it's "infinity," with readings from mathematicians, philosophers and poets.
Unlike most of the larger, more anonymous lectures where freshmen year is often spent, this class has only about a dozen students. There's constant discussion, lots of teacher feedback, and a major year-end writing project.
Such courses have been around nearly a half-century, and longer by some definitions, but their popularity is surging. The number of colleges offering freshman seminars nearly doubled between 2000 and 2003 to about 25 percent, according to surveys of about 620 two- and four-year colleges by a University of South Carolina research center. Connecticut College launched its program this year, and other schools are expanding theirs. [....]
An intimate class with a top professor on a stimulating topic—could there be a more satisfying academic feast? Few would disagree that freshman seminars are what college is supposed to be about. Still, Stanley Katz, a Princeton scholar and longtime observer of curriculum issues, wonders if it is the best use of faculty.
"What we're doing is investing very expensive faculty time teaching both small groups of students and teaching students in their first year of college," he said.And what, we might ask, is wrong with that?
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