Senior government and politics major
General education programs are only useful for students who either desire to explore a wide range of courses to quench their intellectual thirst or for students who clearly have no idea what they want to major or pursue a career in. For those who are already committed to a particular field or course of study, general education requirements simply clog up the process and create unnecessary obstacles to pursuing interesting coursework.
For those students, the best thing to do is get as many requirements as possible out of the way ahead of time. When I came to this university, the only General Education courses I had left to complete were those you could not fulfill through high school standardized testing. I have never set foot in a lab or history course. I even placed out of some of the more obscure General Education requirements: Understanding Plural Societies and Cultural Competence. For the remaining Scholarship in Practice and I-Series requirements, it is easy to find relevant, major-specific courses that fulfill these requirements.
My only real experience with the General Education program was through COMM 107: Oral Communication: Principles and Practices and the professional writing requirement. I feel rather indifferent toward the latter — all students should learn how to craft properly written documents within their fields. From my experience in legal writing, these courses are sufficient to at least expose students to this standard of written scrutiny but only occasionally help provide students with transferable skills. As for oral communication, I felt nothing more than utter disappointment. My professor was knowledgeable and friendly, but there seemed to be some key elements lost in the curriculum.
Why did we spend entire lectures discussing how to get over a fear of public speaking? If this was a public speaking class, why did we never get up on a podium or a stage in front of hundreds of people? Talking in front of your 15 classmates hardly qualifies as public speaking and is simply classroom participation. I was hoping there would be more education about the actual art of speech. Posture, diction and eye contact should have been practiced and emphasized more. There also should have been an attempt to standardize pronunciation and improve verbal ticks. Regional dialects and “um’s” are fine for informal situations, but they distract the audience and obscure the message during a speech.
Despite the perceived shortfalls to General Education courses, they can still be quite helpful for students who wish to explore a wide range of topics and teaching styles. For the rest of us, the trick is to avoid Gen-Eds and lump them into major courses to avoid boredom and frustration.
Tiffany Burba is a senior government and politics major. She can be reached at tburbadbk@gmail.com.
This column is part of our Friday package about General Education courses at this university.
