Remote Ready Biology Learning Activities
Remote Ready Biology Learning Activities has 50 remote-ready activities, which work for either your classroom or remote teaching.
Narrative is determined not by a desire to narrate but by a desire to exchange. (Roland Barthes, S/Z)
What's New? Subscribe to Serendip Studio
A Random Walk
New Topics
-
3 weeks 4 days ago
-
3 weeks 4 days ago
-
8 weeks 4 days ago
-
8 weeks 4 days ago
-
12 weeks 6 days ago
The Bryn Mawr mission
The Bryn Mawr mission statement is to "provide a rigorous education and to encourage the pursuit of knowledge as preparation for life and work, to teach and value critical, creative and independent habits of thought and expression...and to sustain a community diverse in nature and democratic in practice". I think that one way the current requirements contribute to this is simply by making everyone take a wide variety of classes - I think by making people take all sorts of classes, it really 'encourages the pursuit of knowledge' because it may expose people to different things they might not even have known they liked. Also, making people take classes in areas they may not like (maybe because it is a "weak" subject for them) forces them to work and improve their weaker areas.
However, I feel like in some fields, especially the language field!, that the requirement could be less. I think that a 4 semester language requirement is (what Dean Tidmarsh said) only 'beating a language' into someone that doesn't want to learn it. I think that if someone was really passionate about a language, they would take it regardless of the requirement. A 2 semester language requirement ensures that everyone has the basics of SOME language, but if they aren't a 'language person' they don't have to continue. I think shortening the requirements would be beneficial in cases like that - because 'less requirements' still gives the person enough of a 'taste' of the subject to decide if they like it or not. Plus, it would give people more freedom to experiment because they don't have to worry about taking one class they are so-so about over another they really want to take simply because the so-so class fulfills a requirement.
On another note, in some ways I feel that as freshman, we haven't really been at Bryn Mawr long enough to say how well the current requirements will work for us. We haven't even been here a full semester and we don't know if something good will come out of having these requirements (like stumbling across a class that you find out that you love, or something like that).