If you are a typical Dartmouth student, you have probably fallen behind on class work since the first day of this term. You didn't mean to fall behind. You told yourself that you would get a head start on homework, that you would limit pong to only three days per week and that this time things would be different. But then the term began, old friends returned, new hot freshmen caught your eye and you were back to your old routine -- struggling to catch up. This is one of the central struggles that define the Dartmouth experience.
In high school, workloads -- however severe -- were manageable, mostly because the material came predigested in textbooks and study guides. The high school curriculum achieved academic breadth by assigning a wide array of subjects, and depth came through repeated exposure to those subjects at increasingly harder levels. Most Dartmouth courses, however, are self-contained. They do not expect prior knowledge of, or continued interest in, the topic at hand, so they strive for both breadth and depth by assigning a myriad of original texts over the course of ten weeks.
The ever-popular government classes provide a great example. Political Ideas (Government 6), introduced me to political philosophy by assigning Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Hamilton, Madison, Mill, Rousseau, Marx, Engels, Lenin and Burke in ten weeks. How hard is it to absorb the ideas of a dozen of the smartest thinkers who have ever lived, given limited time?
The 15 anonymous reviewers on the Student Assembly Course Guide marked the amount of work just above "about average."
Are we also the smartest thinkers to have ever lived? Perhaps. But Occam's Razor suggests a more likely explanation for how we manage all this assigned material: we rarely read all of it.
A rational Dartmouth student does just enough work to get his or her expected grade, and nothing more. So when Professor Paul Christesen told our Antiquity Today (Classics 1) class during the first week, "The more you read, the better your grade will be," he expressed amusement at how few students understood this simple relationship in previous terms. Most Dartmouth students operate on a completely different model: Do just enough to get by.
This attitude is not the result of laziness or stupidity. It is, in fact, perfectly rational. Given unconquerable mountains of work, we attempt to strategically select the exact work necessary to get the grade. Some really learn to read a book -- to capture the thesis and some of the supporting evidence -- in an hour. But most learn to skim to get the point -- or at least a point -- and move on.
This information overload also means that Dartmouth students forget the material quickly. I asked a few '08 friends what they remembered from their freshman year classes. Most remembered very little of the class content, especially in majors where classes stand alone instead of building on previous courses.
So Dartmouth students become generalists. Having been introduced to disparate subjects at dizzying speeds, we know a little bit of everything in general but not a whole lot of anything in particular.
Certainly each class gives us the opportunity to explore its topic in depth -- reading lists tend to be long and thoughtfully crafted. But then, each term, two (or three) other classes share our schedule and take that opportunity away by introducing their equally demanding syllabi. The upside of this four-year struggle is that we get used to a very fast-paced lifestyle. Most of the '11s noticed this when they took their first break last month. Life back home runs much slower than life at Dartmouth.
Dartmouth is reality on Red Bull. After spending four years here, real life could seem slow -- almost boring. But, on the flip side, the stress of falling behind will be, well, far behind us.
