de Guardiola: Teaching Thinking
(10/04/16 4:15am)
High school seniors are entering an exciting times in their lives, one most of us have probably blocked from our memories — applying to colleges.
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High school seniors are entering an exciting times in their lives, one most of us have probably blocked from our memories — applying to colleges.
In his recent “Make Happy” tour, comedy prodigy Bo Burnham, whose inventive songs often provide commentary on social issues, took a moment to seriously address the audience. Burnham argued, with an impressive degree of awareness and charm, that we are all constantly performing. Social media, he asserted before transitioning back into the show, is the market’s solution to the underlying need we all feel to preform for an audience.
To some Democrats, he’s the end of the world, the apocalypse or the sign of doomsday. To some Republicans, he’s change, a breath of fresh air or an outsider. To Vladimir Putin, he’s a “colorful” man. On both sides of the political aisle and even in other countries, the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump may appear to be a wild card.
Martha Rosler created a photomontage called “The Grey Drape” (1967-72). The piece shows a woman in a silky dress pulling open a window frame in her modern American home, smiling placidly despite the soldiers marching on a battlefield outside her window. This image appears in my head whenever I contemplate the collective attitude in New Hampshire toward the Black Lives Matter movement. Like the woman in her utopic home, Dartmouth and New Hampshire as a whole tend to evade the issue of police brutality due to a false perception that it doesn’t concern New Englanders, white people or students at the College. According to those with this mindset, race doesn’t matter in a state like ours.
I grew up in a small town with small-town values. I knew almost everyone in my high school, and most of my friends spent their weekends running outside or going to church. I still clearly remember the shock I felt when, one spring day about four years ago, I visited my sister, a Dartmouth ‘16, at college and first set foot in a fraternity.
Last week, U.S. News and World Report released its highly anticipated national university rankings. While Dartmouth’s standing in terms of undergraduate teaching plunged from second to seventh place, the College on the hill moved up to 11th place overall. At the very least, we can breathe a sigh of relief now that we have beat Cornell by a solid margin across both measures. Our counterparts in Ithaca will thankfully continue to be the butt of Ivy League humor.
I have never sent a flitz, but I haven’t received one either. My excuse is that my hard-to-spell-Chinese-pinyin-blitz name is a secret that I have fought hard to keep. I’m not talking about romantic rejections, though. The rejections I speak of are far more difficult for some to brush off. Group rejections, whether they are from sports teams, comedy troupes, a cappella groups, dance ensembles, Greek houses, leadership councils or even classes, are truly the ones that can keep you up at night. It’s no surprise then that the height of audition and application season — right about… now — is ripe with the sorrows of fresh rejections.
Dartmouth has often been touted as one of the leading schools for undergraduate teaching in the United States, as it should be: in many other leading institutions, rarely does one find a noted professor teaching undergraduate students, much less is it the norm across classes. At Dartmouth, prospective students and parents can rest assured that their classes will likely be small, their professors will be present and participation will be held to a rigorous standard. Thus, if anything, Dartmouth’s drop in the recent U.S. News & World Report 2016 ranking of the best undergraduate teaching institutions from second to seventh should be read as one of many indicators of problems with the current administration’s policies.
I spent the better part of the past week on a cross country training trip at Dartmouth’s Second College Grant in northern New Hampshire. Activities included running, reading, sleeping, sitting on rocks by the river, wading into the river, returning to rocks by the river, eating, trembling under the mighty vastness of the night sky, wondering about my place in the universe, making little progress, going back to sleep and generally experiencing something I haven’t experienced for quite a while: boredom.