what i learned in college

Since leaving college I've thought a lot about the places (Cambridge, Adams, Boston) and the people (blockmates, acquaintances, Adams residents). Everyone knows that's where the "real" education happens. I rarely actively think about the classes. But I came across some of my old essays this past weekend and I started to think about what I learned academically. Specifically, I read over an essay on the Attica Prison Revolt that I wrote for Social Protest, which I took for our Moral Reasoning core (why can't we call it philosophy like everyone else?). That class was hard because while I can be logical, I find it hard to be so rigid and theoretical. I remember being frustrated while writing the essays because we had to refer to so-and-so's framework and you can't make statements like, say, "Even though his life was shorter, it was fuller" the way you can in English. And even harder was the pressure to be original when it feels like every theory's been taken; the objective is so much more limited than the subjective. But as I was reading over the reasoning in the paper, I found myself appreciative of strict reasoning, and I was glad to be forced into taking a stand instead of relying on only instinctual feelings of right and wrong. Because even if I just reasoned my way back to what I initially felt instinctually, it made me better understand how I see things, and pushed me to defend my perspective.

All that made me think of John Parker's last Shakespeare lecture where he told us that he wasn't teaching us his interpretations but instead a way of thinking and reading. I can't even remember the phrase he used, but I recall the basic premise--that after we forget our scribbled notes and essay theses, he hopes we'll remember how to approach literature, how to study it and how to enjoy it. And to be honest, for all the classes I took, I would not for the life of me be able to describe to you every literary era or tell you the major themes of all the classics. I can't quote poetry off the top of my head and I can't remember all the names behind the pseudonyms. But English at college made language a real, living thing for me. I settled into loving a sentence like it was written for me, finding that the color green could make me inwardly ache because it described something both groteseque and heartbreaking, carrying a character around with me. And having the privilege of being around writers made me so aware of stories being imagined and observed and relayed--to hear Helen Vendler talk about why poetry is important, why James Wood simply liked a passage, Jamaica Kincaid introduce a grad whose thesis became a book, Stephen Greenblatt act out Othello, Zadie Smith give the stage to Dave Eggers, Nick Hornby. Swoon.

And then there's the science. A lot of it was awful but chemistry compensated for me. I hated chemistry in high school and it was hard to adjust in the beginning because I knew nothing when I took chem in college. But freshman chemistry is still one of my favorite classes. The problem sets were painful for their reliance on us manipulating otherwise straightforward calculations, but I liked the concepts of equilibrium and kinetics. After I accepted being bad at organic chemistry, I just let myself enjoy it, and it was easy to do that with Jacobsen, speed-chalk-writer and notorious Mr. Serious who despite the intimidation convinced me this was beautiful. Again, I wouldn't remember how to synthesize anything now and I barely remember the names of the groups but I still recall the premise of making bonds, seeking stability. I remember being fascinated by how on the smallest level, we just want to be stable, to be compatible with things around us, how we will always react a certain way in a certain situation. None of this appreciation helped me do particularly well in these classes but they made me think about science much differently, and I could see how one might equate this kind of structure with the existence of a higher form. And in the idea that maybe we make up this structure, I found myself back in literature--and I felt that everything's a story.

So I'm incredibly grateful to college for giving me so many forms of thought. There's more of course, the bits of art, history, math, sociology that I picked up along the way--none of it enough to think I know anything about any of it, especially since I remember very little, but it's nice to have peeks into how people who really know, might form their thoughts. On top of that, I'm grateful for the outside lectures, the diverse tutors in our houses, the clubs who brought the outside world into our campus.

I remember hearing Samantha Power talk about Darfur, and distinctly feeling that this was a privilege because I wasn't just learning about the issue, I was hearing about it from this amazing journalist/activist who I probably wouldn't have even heard of otherwise. And yet I'm probably still not as informed as I should/easily could be. And I thought of Henry and him always pushing us to ask what are the implications of our privilege, and what're we going to do with it. Understanding it has taken some time, but I do hope I'll have it in me to take the next step of using it. It's so very cliche and often for pomp more than substance but I do think of that Harvard Yard inscription--the one that tells you to "enter and grow in wisdom" as you come in and to "depart to better serve thy country and thy kind" as you leave.

I'm still somewhere in between grow and depart.