First Year Students in Social Work Education

Abstract

After teaching sociology for several years to Arts students and in a General Studies course for everything from Architecture to Wool Technology, Social Work re-visited proved disenchanting. Students screamed and ran at the sight of me, and even my colleagues hinted that standards and workloads at which industrial engineers and optometrists had never cavilled were too demanding for social work students. Having myself a degree in science of a fairly technical kind, it was not surprising that I had always found students in science and applied science courses the easiest to teach. My reaction to the social work students was on the lines of “Why can't they be like me?”