As I was talking last Friday with the professor who teaches my Great Books and Rhetoric course, I was bemoaning my inexperience with close reading and digging into deep meaning within texts. I can do facts: I can name all the nations in Europe and most of their capitals, I can list the U.S. Presidents in order (I tried it just to make sure, and while I put Fillmore and Garfield in the wrong slots and actually forgot Cleveland entirely, the fact that I got them wrong will probably mean that I'll get them right in the future), I know most of the Periodic Table, and I can rattle off a pretty inclusive summary of yesterday's assigned reading from the Odyssey. I can do patterns, too. I am, after all, avidly pursuing the understanding of both math and music, and I think grammar is cool. But getting into the deeper structure of a work, understanding the mind of the author, finding the purpose behind the plot -- these are habits I have never formed.
Beyond the part that my personality plays in this unfortunate fact, I am largely to blame. As a homeschooler, I was basically in charge of my education throughout high school. My mom planned out my curriculum, bought my books, and checked on my progress, but it was up to me to make sure I was actually learning in my various subjects. Some courses were harder or more loathsome than others, naturally, but on one course and one only did I actually give up: Skills for Literary Analysis.
SfLA was a correspondence course that I took for about two or three months, during which time I wrote almost exclusively on The Call of the Wild (which I hated) and the story of Joseph in the book of Genesis. I got my first B on a paper in that class, and I couldn't figure out what was wrong. I had no illusions of grandeur--I didn't like the paper myself--but I could not figure out how to improve it. When I asked my teacher, he just told me that he "graded subjectively." I quit.
What am I finding most challenging in college? Literary analysis, or more broadly, critical thinking. Lesson learned.
I explained some of this in far fewer words and with far fewer details to my professor, noting that Calculus is my easiest subject.
"I got through Calculus in college, and that's about it," he replied. "I worked hard, and I did well, but I never looked back." Perhaps, he suggested, Rhetoric & Great Books will be like that for me.
But I do not think so. Although Calculus is a fascinating subject which increases one's ability to solve problems, to understand the way things work, and to appreciate the orderliness of creation and the genius of other men, outside of a math-related field, it is rarely used. Not many people are like my grandfather, whose job as the printer for our church's publishing outfit didn't stop him from spending his free time teaching trigonometry to his young grandchildren and forming theorems to go along with the one for which Pythagoras is so famous. No, most people either use calculus regularly or shelve it permanently, or they never study it at all.
Critical thinking is different. It affects how one views so many things: literature, news, philosophy, religion, other people... And I want to learn how to think critically and analytically. That's why I came to Hillsdale instead of going to some technical school where I could become a skilled engineer/musician without going through Hillsdale's famously rigorous core program. I want to challenge my thinking process, to improve my understanding, and to get the kind of education that improves the student himself instead of attempting to expand his internal database. And I'm pretty sure I have come to the right place.
So what is the "horrid disadvantage of a scientific major"? Well, it really isn't a horrid disadvantage at all. The "horrid disadvantage" is that everything I'm studying is to a purpose. Unlike the English and History majors, most of whom are studying math and science because they are required and will (I imagine) leave them behind when they graduate, I have to know the technical things and the critical thinking/literature things. Everything I'm studying is something I will need to know later; in the long run, I have to remember twice as much.
The flip side is that I get to remember twice as much. I love learning, and I love using what I learn. Being on track to be able to do a lot of both makes me pretty happy.
Virtus tentamine gaudet.
2 comments:
Hooray! You updated your blog so that we can see if you stay friends with Ben in 2010.
Well, it certainly is more pressure in one sense, since you can't really blow off any of your classes. But I can't picture you blowing off any classes anyway, so that's okay.
And as far as having to remember more things, you seem to have gotten that down just fine.
Anyway, the beauty of literary criticism, or critical thinking, is it isn't really something you have to "remember" -- it's something that you learn as you practice, and as you practice it becomes more and more natural. It's more like handwriting than the multiplication tables: you don't have to memorize good handwriting, you just use it.
And nothing is more motivating in a class than the thought that it will be truly useful to you in the future.
So look at it as a glorious privilege: you already have the brain for facts, so that part's all set: now you get to round it out with learning critical thinking, which you know you want to do.
So I say, Hurray! Lucky you! You'll end up the perfect Renaissance man! (If you can just survive the process...)
: )
Post a Comment