I started this post a week ago, and it got so unbelievably long that I wrote the other one about college just to cut this down. And then this week went crazy, and I'll have to tell you about my Reference homework sometime.
But the thrust of this post is this: things come in batches around here, and last week was no exception. In Harvard Square a couple of weeks ago, killing time before the Sarah Vowell reading, I picked up a book from a display in the Coop called My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student. It was catchy and interesting--an anthropology professor enrolls as an undergraduate at her own large university, living in the dorms, taking a full course load, etc. The first chapter, as perused in the bookstore, was very catchy and memoir-ish, so I checked it out of the library.
The book ended up being much more pop-anthropology than memoir, and took fully five hours to read cover to cover. And, though I'm 10 years out of college, it didn't tell me much that I don't already know. (Though I suppose you could say I have maintained a little bit of an insider's perspective, having worked in the college textbook industry.) You would really think it would barely have registered on my radar, but somehow I ended up thinking about it a lot for a day or two after I finished it.
What was really compelling was not so much the observations about student culture, which were not really unexpected at all, even the ones that didn't reflect my college experience. What I found very interesting were the author's reactions to her observations. It's the things that surprised her that really stuck with me and were so interesting. The author's name, Rebekah Nathan, is a pseudonym, and she doesn't identify the university. It's unclear to me how old she is exactly, but I get the impression that she's in her late 40s or early 50s. She goes back to school "undercover" as a returning freshman--unlike other researchers who have studied student life, she does not reveal herself to be a professor, for the most part.
As someone from an academic setting, she's aware that a lot of people take classes they're not that interested in, do only the reading that is actually necessary to pass the test or not get humiliated in class, don't talk naturally to professors, etc. I was impressed by her developing comprehension of a lot of those things--that a busy, challenging schedule sometimes has to be padded with a class that is easy or fills a time slot, that there really is a huge amount of work to do and you can't always to do it all, or even understand why you should. She was surprised by the number of students whose paying jobs were part of the reason they didn't have as much time to study; my guess is that this is partly related to the fact that school is no longer a luxury for those who can afford it, but a necessity for those who need to stretch for it.
I think a lot of these things had to do with her real naivete, going in, about the nature of student priorities. In the book, she observed that students saw school in two main ways: a great life experience--living with your friends, meeting new people, partying and being on your own--and a means to the end of preparing yourself for the "real world"--qualifying for a better job, learning the ropes of whatever field you're going to be in, joining clubs and volunteering in ways that will build your resume. She was absolutely bowled over by the fact that almost none of them saw school as a place to explore ideas for their own sake, to learn for the sake of knowledge--as opposed to for the sake of knowledge that you'll need.
Obviously, as a professor, she's lived her life in academia; her undergrad experience segued into a ton of grad school. She studied for the love of learning; she prioritized the school's priorities, enough to make them her own, her life work. She chose to go to college when you did that for a specific reason, presumably, rather than because that was just what people do.
Anyway, this book just stuck with me. There is a whole section on international students, and how a lot of them felt like Americans weren't really interested in them, because they didn't ask personal questions (Nathan doesn't point out that, in my opinion, asking personal questions of an acquaintance is rude and prying--first you become friends, then you ask for life details). I got the impression that the friendliness of acquaintances and the true connection of friends are easily conflated by people who aren't comfortable with American culture. This really inspired me to strike up a conversation with one of my classmates who just moved here from Iraq to get his PhD in Library and Information Science. Turns out, I learned, that he's not just a librarian in Iraq, he's actually a LIS professor over there; and here, he's turned back into a student. We were talking about how different that is.
Everything comes full circle.
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