Universities are a breeding ground for interested young minds, eager to acquire a meaningful education with hopes of a promising career.
But why does school have to be so boring?
As students, we choose to be here. We wake up early, commute, sit in traffic and load up on coffee. We choose to challenge ourselves, participate in mandatory assignments and study for tests that our short-term memories won’t satisfy. We choose a major we are interested in, and our expectations of a seemingly interesting class almost always fall short with an incredibly dated and boring curriculum.
“I am bored in all five of my classes because the teachers are just reciting information that isn’t relevant to you,” said Adrian Garcia, 22, a fourth year marketing major at California State University, Long Beach. “It’s just a dry, pointless Power Point lecture. Teachers have what I like to call ‘nuggets of knowledge,’ which are interesting, but there is no real experience handoff.”
Even with the addition of 26 more smart classrooms this semester, where groups of students have their own computers at round tables, and walls made to write on, professors use these new smart panels to display still more Power Point presentations.
Why can’t these mandatory classes kick it up a notch, and do something different?
“I never walk away from a semester feeling like I have retained all the information given to me,” fourth year sociology major Paige Kantor said. “A lot of my teachers just lecture and give irrelevant busy-work projects that are a huge waste of time and effort, because when am I going to refer back to this in the real world?”
A study conducted in 2006 by neurologist and teacher Judy Willis concluded that learning is one of the many benefits that come along with having fun. Yes—fun.
“The human brain and body respond positively to laughter with the release of endorphin, epinephrine, and dopamine and with increased breathing volume,” Willis wrote.
By making learning more fun for students, professors would actually contribute to the long-term learning process.
Our generation, the millennials, are the future of the professional workforce, and we need to be properly equipped with knowledge in order to succeed.
Many professors still utilize old-school teaching methods, but now, more than ever, they must integrate technology and fun into our education so that we can actually benefit from all the time and money we spend in a classroom.