Every Wednesday when I walk into my FOCUS class, I see 27 eyes filled with dread. All freshmen experienced an extremely hard course in their first year of college. However, students find FOCUS pointless. According to ULM, a FOCUS session uses high impact, active learning strategies to engage students in hands-on, team-based approaches to historically difficult topics.
During my FOCUS sessions, I am bored out of my mind and doing activities not being taught in my lectures.
For one, historically hard classes take a lot of time out of the week, especially for majors that have nothing to do with the material. You already have the course twice in the week then once a week you have FOCUS, then you have lab if it’s required.
You are basically breathing that class at that point. If someone majors in mass communication or English for starters, why do they need to take a metacognition course to help them learn some rules and facts that will not help us at all in the real world? The class would be less annoying if it was optional like the SI study sessions ULM also offers. The FOCUS portion is worth 10% of the final grade. If you had a 90 in the class, your grade is brought down to a low B just because you did not come to something that was supposed to help you. That makes no sense at all. If you are not going to help me, that’s fine. However, there’s no point in having FOCUS if you’re going to do more harm than good to my grade.
The FOCUS curriculum should be re-evaluated and be more effective with student engagement.
Have more fun activities like trivia with scientific facts or coloring a diagram of different organelles. I love the idea, but it could be better with the execution.
