Get an engineering degree! Man a help desk!
I have hopes that Thing One might become an engineer one day. He's a math guy more than a reading and writing guy. My fear is that he will work on Wall Street, because he's also a money guy and a needlessly aggressive towards social norms guy, too.
But it's pretty obvious that there is something really, really wrong with the way we teach math and science at the college level, and that includes medical school education.
We routinely decry the way Asian students memorize textbooks. Why can't OUR kids do that? Um, because they aren't drones? I'm just guessing here.
According to the article, you actually DO get a lot of kids interested in the STEM courses (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math). But then they get to college and that interest is beaten out of them by a curriculum that is as intellectually engaging as being waterboarded.
Our Dean of Academics likes to say that we shouldn't adopt lectures into our class plans under the idea that kids will get lectured to in college. Because, as he puts it, "just because they don't know how to teach in college is no reason to teach poorly here."
STEM professors are probably not great "teachers". STEM teachers in high school often are. So kids come out of high school with wonder and curiosity and get it beaten out of them. The idea that somehow memorizing a formula is more important than understanding how it works is mind-blowing. But that's how science education is approached.
Hopefully things will change before too long.
We need engineers a lot more than Wall Street "quants".
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