Quindecim

Issue date: 2/9/05 Section: Opinion

Shoshana Flax is a senior at Goucher College and the Opinion Editor of The Quindecim.

As the semester begins, some of you are returning from semesters across an ocean (welcome back!). Although I spent last semester right here, living on campus, I feel like I'm returning, too. Twelve of us had our own "off-campus experience" last semester, spending our days (and sometimes part of our evenings) student teaching in schools all over the area.

Coming back from any sort of internship is a transition. For a few months this fall, every task I did had a directly practical value. In the evening, I was writing a lesson plan to (ideally) keep twenty-four fifth graders interested long enough to learn what verbs were, or creating a worksheet to give them just the right amount of practice at dividing with decimals. The next day, I was trying to convince a student that it would behoove him to stay in his seat, or reminding someone that recess was only for people who did their homework.

A month and a half later, I find myself reading a novel for an English seminar and searching for a topic for the response essay due in a few days. I'm enjoying - savoring - being back to the normal routine for one more semester. At the same time, sitting in class again, processing and analyzing information often for its own sake, makes me think about what it means to be a student.

Sometimes, the purpose of a class is obvious. Just as video production classes help turn Communications majors into well-equipped members of the media, and any class that pre-med students take about the human body helps all of us to sleep better at night, classes with titles like "Methods of Teaching Math/Reading/Science/Social Studies" clearly function to help make future teachers know what they're doing. By the same token, the writing workshop I'm taking for my other major, English with Concentration in Writing, could help me to at least reach the point of "I've written a book, and now all I need to do is find a publisher."

After spending a semester so focused on practicing for my future job, though, I find that some classes require a completely different mentality. I'm reading and interpreting novels again. I'm studying, not how I will educate children, but the history of how others have done it in America since the seventeenth century. I see those around me reading about philosophy, about anthropology, about astronomy. Studying languages beyond the foreign language requirement. Why?

Continued...

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