Posted on 10/07/2022 2:42:29 PM PDT by Twotone
New York University fired Maitland Jones Jr. because his organic chemistry course was “too hard.” The man wrote the textbook on the subject, now in its fifth edition, and had been a star teacher at Princeton. He went out of his way to tape his lectures, at his own cost, to mitigate some of the attendance problems attributed to the pandemic.
Yet students revolted because they feared, according to the New York Times, that “they were not given the grades that would allow them to get into medical school.”
The professor, meanwhile, saw a different problem: “They weren’t coming to class. … They weren’t watching the videos, and they weren’t able to answer the questions.” But the school terminated his employment rather than the students, who are on track to become physicians despite struggling to get into med school.
Every American should be worried because this kind of standard-lowering is becoming commonplace in medical school.
Organic chemistry is a very difficult subject. Doing well in the course in college has been a litmus test for medical-school suitability. It demands discipline, ability to think in three dimensions, memorizing complex structures, managing a series of chemical rules and solving intricate problems. Its intellectual demands and need for disciplined study are surrogates for the discipline and problem-solving physicians must demonstrate throughout their careers.
Jones could not be more correct in his judgment that his organic chemistry course should be tough. Entry into medical school these days is almost a guarantee that a student will one day have a medical degree and a license to practice medicine. Even struggling students are coached through to graduation. I know this as I was the associate dean for curriculum at Penn’s medical school.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Old not-so-funny joke:
What do they call someone who graduates from medical school at the bottom of his class?
Doctor.
Didn’t he have tenure?
Won’t matter much once we have single payer healthcare because no one will have access to it at that point anyway and treatments will be whatever is mandated by big pharma.
But I get the joke.....
I saw my Cardiologist earlier this year. He had a new resident training who had no idea how to use the echocardiogram. Heaven help us!
Future anything = covid vx
I’ve taught O-Chem, it’s supposed to be tough and yes it’s a course that weeds out the lower achieving pre-med students. I explain on the very first day what you need to do to get an A in my class, mostly it’s a serious time commitment. Some listen, some don’t.
The medical profession will be mostly done by robots within twenty years, maybe sooner.
Dumbing it down will speed that process up.
The elites will get human doctors, and they will be people who could pass organic.
Is it really to much to ask for someone to show up to class?
Oh....and I work in the Med. field also....and have known some total moron Doc’s. I could tell you stories.....
Similar thing happened at UF College of Engineering nearly 30 years ago, mandatory course called Hydraulics. Kind of necessary for civil engineering. Tough class but you could get through it (with a C which was enough). Anyway a couple of a-holes complained to the dean, and rather than watering down the class (pun intended) the professor quit. A loss to generations of future engineers, when you made it through his class you *knew* the material.
This is what happens when a generation is given trophies for coming in last.
Start to sweet-talk your pet’s vet so you can get some care-giver advice in the future to help “prolong your pet’s day to day quality of life”.
It’s for your pet’s well being after all.
A friend of mine who has a PhD in Physical Chemistry from Stanford used to be a chemistry professor. Many of his students were taking chemistry as a prerequisite for medical degrees. They were so unprepared coming out of high school that he had to resort to teaching them remedial algebra first before they could even have a prayer of understanding chemistry. It was pathetic.
I loved both semesters of organic. A lot of memorization. But so much fun!!
The lab was long tedious afternoons.
Organic separates the wheat from the chaff.
My husband’s degree is in Chem. Mine was medical technology.
We both had a year of organic.
Great memories.
This empire is over. Our education has been declining for a long time.
“Organic chemistry is a very difficult subject.”
When I took it, the professor insisted it didn’t require a lot of memorization. But it seemed to me mostly about rote memorization. Reagents, temperatures, pressures, catalysts.
Flash cards were my friends.
UF had a real good engineering school when I was there. It’s a shame that it got watered down like that.
Heck, Randy Mantooth knew how to run one back in the 70’s!
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