Composing a Further Life

well connected that they could stop teaching in the middle of the class if they wanted to and nobody could stop them. They would not think of doing that. That’s not the culture of the place. The culture of the place is one that believes they’re supposed to teach.”
    “But, Dick,” I said, “I think you’re talking about places where people are teaching their heirs, they’re replicating themselves, they have superb students, which is different from teaching biology in a place where nobody is going to become a biologist, nobody is going to—”
    “People at MIT feel they
ought
to teach, because, they say, why would you get some of the best undergraduates and graduates in the country to come to MIT and then stick them with people who are inferior teachers? At Harvard they seem by and large to be untroubled by those sorts of concerns. At MIT, of course, everybody had to take biology. Econ majors, political science majors, engineering majors, physics majors. So maybe some of it is, they’re teaching themselves, but the bulk of that class out there is people who are never going to take any more biology. And a fraction of them hate it.
    “At the University of Maryland, where I was on the faculty for ten years, you got an extremely broad spectrum of students, particularly at the time I was there. I had a lot of premeds, and of course you had people who were in nursing and so on. And chemistry departments are notorious for failing students, for discouraging students, and for demoralizing students. Chemistry is really sadistic. They’re a little like musicians—chemistry is something you kind of can do or you can’t, and they generally have very little patience for people who can’t do it. Well, at the University of Maryland, they would teach introductory chemistry for close to two thousand students each semester. That’s a lot of people. And they had a reputation in the seventies for failing maybe twenty or thirty percent of the kids.
    “Then a physical chemist, a successful and very good researcher, took the job as chairman of that very large department—they had more than fifty faculty members—a routine, tough, state university chemistry department. And he said, ‘This is ridiculous.’ So he went to the School of Education and said, I think we need to worry about science
education
, and he got a woman named Margie Gardener with a degree in education, who joined the chemistry department, supported by both departments financially, and her job was to show them how to teach chemistry. Eventually they realized, ‘The problem is, we expect people to learn it too quickly; all we care about is to get them through the semester.’ So, instead of an up or out system, a one chance only system, they adopted a mastery system. You take the exam, and if you fail the exam, they don’t let you go to the next exam to fail that one, you retake the one you failed a week later. This time you still don’t do so well, just a little better, and so two weeks later, you’d have to take that exam again. Guess what? The majority of the students could finally get to the point where they could answer seventy percent of the questions. So they were giving Cs to almost everybody who finished elementary chemistry, and they actually knew that much chemistry. They just changed the way of teaching from ‘you’re too dumb to learn this, go away,’ to ‘we can teach you this and you can do it. We’ll help you and we’ll give you time to learn it. We’re not going to reward you the same way we reward people who get a hundred percent the first time around, because that gives everybody the wrong message, everybody.’ ” Dick made a sweeping gesture. “It’s the way to teach.”
    “That sounds like Home Depot. ‘You can do it, we can help.’ ”
    “If you get the right leadership, you know, you see that sort of thing happening. Amherst College has decided to adopt what they call intensive sessions in economics and chemistry.… The chemists are actually doing better than anybody else right now, even though they’ve got the most difficult subject. The kids have more class meetings, they have more little quizzes, they have more exercises to do. They have all the lecture classes with the other students who are taking chemistry, but their sections are called intensive sections because there’s more drill involved, and they also have labs for these special sections. We do more work, too; it takes a lot more time. The special