I just finished reading through Cathy Small’s book, “My Freshman Year,” written under the pseudonym Rebekah Nathan. The book discusses the culture of college, as Small discovered my enrolling as a student to do an anthropological study of the modern college culture. Her ethnography (a written report that describes human phenonmena) divulges the inner workings of dorm life (rooms decorated with beer bottles and first week ice-breakers), class registration (don’t take classes on Fri. or before 10am), and intellectual life (almost nobody discusses class content outside of class, or visits professors, except to discuss grades and assignments).
As I read on another website, not much in the book is all that eye-opening. You can watch Animal House and PCU and get a pretty good grasp of college culture. But her book was useful to me in thinking deeper about the college experience as a cultural experience, and as something that can be studied and discussed intellectually. Since I don’t have much background in anthropology, it was interesting to think about the “rituals” and “cultural norms” that exist in college, and to begin to recognize how culture can often best be recognized by foreigners, or by stepping out of ones own culture.
The concept I liked most was the idea of students having “scripts,” whereby they act and say things similar to others in their culture. Most students (and I’m grappling with the fact that it’s not all students and that people have free will), will limit their out-of-class discussions about class to things unrelated to content, usually to complain about something or tell anecdotal stories about the class. Small, who undertook this research project in part to help her better understand her students, suggests teachers have their students think about this idea, so that they may think of themselves as students eager to learn and excited to engage the class material.
Another section of her book I found interesting was about the culture of cheating in college. Small notes the higher number of students who admit to some amount of cheating, and explains how many students view cheating in college not as a moral flaw, but as an acceptable part of the culture in certain circumstances. As someone who was punished for plagiarizing in college, it was reassuring to realize just how normal a student I was for what I did, and for learning that many students shared my rationale that assignments with no personal interest was a leading reason for plagiarism. The ethics and consequences can be debated, but what this book made me think is that cheating in college is a symptom of the college culture.
I’m re-reading parts of my own book, and beginning to realize how amazing it is that I captured so much of my college experience (and yet how little of the experience I actually cover). Essentially, what I’m seeing is how I began to recognize the absurdities of the culture I was living in, and how it had corroded so many students and myself, in the process.
If I want to continue thinking about these issues, I need to boil down my thesis and my solutions. One thing I’m beginning to see is the importance for teachers and students to understand each other’s realities. As they break the walls down, teachers can better reach their students and help change the script that students typically have for school.
Another discovery I made from re-reading my book, is the range of thoughts I was grappling with while in college. Everything from the culture of drinking, to the culture of how we choose our majors and careers, to the financial issues of attending college and jobs. I get into the ethics of plagiarism, the mental health of college students, and student awareness of political issues and their involvement in causes. I now recognize and am pretty much at peace with the fact that I did actually learn very little in my college classes, as a mixed result of material being either beyond my ability to understand, not interesting to me, or my own inability to pay attention and stay organized as a student. Yet, the list of things I begin to address are the beginning of what could be years of writing and research.
I’ll end this post with a bit of thinking I’ve been doing recently about my life. In the last couple of months I’ve begun to think about the “limits” in life, whereas I often carried around fantasies of my abilities. For example, I know longer run around thinking I have all the answers to education, when in fact I know that I actually know very little on the topic, which I’ve discovered from talking with veteran educators. Still, I believe that with focus and effot, one can push these limits and develop themselves, and I believe I’m starting to do that.
Also, since I’ve come back from Israel, I’ve been viewing my life as though I were travelling abroad. I’m trying to remind myself everyday, “I live in Brooklyn, New York!” just as every morning abroad I’d wake up and be fully aware I was in London, or Tel Aviv, or Jerusalem. I even pretend that my friends from abroad are with me, so when I buy a bagel, or watch baseball, or sit here typing, I do so thinking that if my foreign friends were here, they would be noticing all sorts of things and observing much about my culture that is different from theirs.
Signing out…
-dan
