It's not surprising that the intellectual universe of science major freshmen at UCI is yet narrow, full of weird prejudices and misconceptions. What strikes me is that they're not trying to expand it: they tend to take what I mentioned in class only in passing for absolute, believing that what they learned in class are all the things they should know to talk about a given topic with confidence. For instance, when I assign a few texts, they consider these scant examples are "the" representatives of the genre and nothing exists outside of them. They have no sense of history and hierarchy, thus confusing the dead with the living, novelists with critics. To read their wild generalization and crazy simplification is very exhausting. What kinds of cognitive maps are in their heads?
