Some courses are more difficult to teach than others, and I think we’d all agree that general education courses are among the hardest courses to teach. For one thing, most students don’t want to take them. They don’t think they need to know the content, aren’t curious about it, and don’t hesitate to tell us how much they don’t like it, even though they know little about it. And if the content turns out to be difficult, their negativity grows in proportion. Then there are the classes themselves, often large and sometimes numbering in the hundreds. Meanwhile the faculty tasked with teaching these challenging courses tend to be those with the least experience.
