Apropos of nothing in particular:
I took four years of honors lab sciences in high school, and a year of honors chemistry, with labs, in college. I invariably did very well on the exams, and often lost a letter grade for the poor quality of my labs. I wish once, in all of that time (and we might as well add the lab courses from middle school to this), an instructor had bothered to tell us what the point of the labs was, because I was too hostile and paranoid to figure it out for myself. Continue reading