While most Dartmouth students drank themselves silly in tropical climes or bored themselves at home over break, I did something different. Yes, this was my "alternative spring break," although I certainly wasn't helping the homeless, unless you believe that by homeless I mean myself, and by soup shelter you mean Novack. For spring break, I did the same thing that I'd been doing for the previous 10 weeks " work.
I am writing a thesis this term. (At this point, you, the reader, must be thinking, "Superb, old chap, another editorial opining how much work some arrogant Dartmouth student has. Well bollocks to that, I'm doing the crossword" " or at least that's what you would be thinking if you were British.) But to you who may or may not have had fun during break, I say, in the words of Edith Piaf, "Je ne regrette rien."
I don't regret holing up in Novack from midnight till dawn and I don't regret writing an op-ed that might at first seem self-referential. I don't regret any of these things because I think the state of the thesis writer is indicative of a larger pedagogical problem within our fine College. What I am thinking about is the lack of preparation that Dartmouth " and more generally " college education bestows upon the student.
First " my state. I, like most other honors students, have never had to write an 80-100 page paper before. In fact, before I began writing, I had no idea where to begin because the only models I had were books by professional critics that often ran hundreds of pages longer than I can ever hope to write in two terms. It soon became clear to me that if I was to go to graduate school after Dartmouth, I would have to teach myself. Dartmouth education has a particular problem in teaching its students how to write; it can teach them how to think, but it fails at teaching methodology and research skills, severely disadvantaging the student who wishes to pursue a career path other than that of finance or various professional schools.
Following this vein, I also came to realize that my high school education provided me with the fundamentals for my writing while college has only supplied me with ideas [read: crap] to complement these skills. One might counter that Dartmouth has mandated us to take English 2 and 3 or 5 and a First-Year Seminar, but I would say to that person that those courses are only successful in helping the students who need help the most. The average and better student benefits less from these courses as a result, for it is particularly hard to improve any person's writing in one term, especially one so short as ours.
Particularly in the English department, but also across the Humanities and Social Sciences, it is extremely helpful to be able to ape the dominant linguistic style of the leading critics in the field. Being able to signal to the professor that you have imbibed a large body of critical vocabulary means that you automatically rise in the esteem of the professor; whether or not you have actually done the work, using names such as "Foucault" in English or "Waltz" in Government buy you the tertiary equivalent of the gold star you got in first grade. In large part the skill of mimicry is not one taught by professors, but one implicitly expected of the student. There are a few professors I have encountered who do not fall for this ruse, but they are few and far between. So it was not surprising during sophomore year that it was one enterprising student, and not a professor, who told me to look at criticism to get an idea about a topic for a paper of mine.
At another school where the professors are even less involved in the day-to-day meanderings of their students, this process of imitation would be no less of a problem. However, Dartmouth is one of the few schools that operates on a quarter system (due to its strange decision to shuttle students to and fro from school rather than build new dormitories after coeducation). The 10-week term is not conducive to a liberal arts education. For example, while I took Literary Theory my sophomore summer and was able to read 40 pages of Marx, my friend from college read all of Marx in one term.
The fragmentation of learning makes the education that we gain outside the classroom shakier. For as I learn by imitation, I have to rely upon smaller segments of texts than the more sustained learning that goes on at other schools. The result is that I am potentially relying on a weaker understanding of the material.
As Dartmouth attempt to shift its focus more toward a university-style education, it should be aware of the real ways that students learn at this school and the limitations inherent in its current setup. We certainly have a problem on our hands, and one that has not been addressed in any meaningful way.
