To remember what life was once like when we were younger is a fine art. Last night, on the eve of the first day of school, my eight-year-old son asked, "Mom, what was it like when you entered third grade?" His question led me to reminisce about what it was like to be a freshman in college. I do recall that I spent time wondering if I looked as alone and bewildered as I sometimes felt! Figuring out the differences between high school and college challenged me. As I reflected upon my own experiences I remembered a young woman I'll call Ruth, and I'd like to tell you a bit about her experience.
She took her freshman year at what was then called Montana Tech, staying at home to save money, a plan that her parents presented to her as the only way she would get to college. She and her brother were the first people in the family to attend college. Fall semester was a whirlwind of social activities, dances, and football games--she even went to class with some regularity. Confident that the habits she had acquired in high school for "managing school" would hold her in good stead, she seldom opened a textbook unless under threat of an upcoming quiz, and she procrastinated on writing papers. Major test over a few chapters? Start reading them at least within 48 hours before the time you walked into the exam. Paper to write? That required a little more time. Almost always, her final draft was in reality little more than a slightly reworked first draft.
During the Thanksgiving break she made what she thought was such an adult decision, to take the train from Butte to visit an aunt in Seattle, knowing she had the most major biology exam of the semester the Monday she returned. No problem, she could read the stuff on the train on the way back. What else was there to do with that time? The results of that exam contributed to her earning less than a 2. 0 grade point average her first semester, a record she spent three-and-a-half years trying to improve in hopes that future employers might take her seriously.
Despite an unpromising freshman year, the next fall found her at the University of Montana, still with the old habits mostly in place. Now this was the early '70s, and she considered herself a feminist by then, coming to that conclusion because she had finally broken free from the expectation others had of her that she would just go back to Butte and marry by age 19. In a rhetoric class, she was assigned to read what she considered some dusty, old, uninteresting plays written by dead guys who knew nothing about the "real world." One of those plays was Lysistrata by Aristophanes, a 5th century B.C. playwright. As usual, she put off reading it until the night before her response paper was due, finally beginning at about 9 p.m. Her estimated time of completion for the required paper was 2 a.m., and with a big pot of black tea for stimulation, she thought she might finish sooner.
While reading Lyisistrata, a funny, ribald play about how a group of women plot to use sex to get their men to stop waging war, she laughed so hard that at one moment she laid her head down on the book as tears ran out of her eyes. As she read, she realized that she knew nothing about resolving the tension between women and men and that Aristophanes had tackled the issue of power between the sexes with impressive imagination. And, as sometimes happens when one is emotionally engaged, another thought came to her. The power that her professors had been offering her, of understanding, of thinking, of trying to comprehend the human condition, she had stubbornly and shortsightedly refused. Instead of taking what they offered her with palms outstretched, she had been standing with her arms rigid at her sides, hands clenched in refusal. At the moment of her realization, she stopped "going to college" and started to get an education. She became an eager, receptive, inquiring, challenging student--a person engaged in the important work of her own education. Now, as you might have guessed, I, Vickie Ruth Christie, am this young woman.
Just as a work ethic implies getting to work on time, being cheerful about doing one's task, and working hard, an academic work ethic implies the understanding of important premises as well. As I reflect upon the beginning of my college career, there are three elements for success that I wish I had understood about college.
The first has to do with what I call ownership of one's education. Several years ago, I was in a remote area of the Philippine Islands for several weeks. As I sat at a bus stop, I observed some very young schoolchildren in uniforms lining up to enter a school. I began to chat with the local people waiting with me and asked, "How many years do young people go to public school?" The reply was that children got five years paid for by the state, then, if their families had the money, they went on. For just a moment, think of how your life and mine would have been altered if the education we received had stopped at age ten!
The United States has a public school system that is envied in many quarters of the world, but because we make a commitment to everyone for twelve years of education, we perceive the opportunity as a kind of compulsory service that limits rather than liberates us. We even use language that implies that education imprisons. We look forward to "getting out," and we "escape" or are "set free" from school. If I could now name one difference between college and high school that I wish I had understood, it is this: you do not have to be here. Now, please understand, I did not say you are free, because the nature of adult life is that we make choices, all of which have consequences. But college is only one of many interesting possibilities in life. If you are here, it is because you want to be.
There can be no greater sign of the difference between high school and college than in how you obtained your books in high school and college. Probably in your last semester of high school the teacher handed out books, saying something like, "Now please take care of these," implying taxpayers bought them for you. On your recent trip to the Rocky Mountain College bookstore you may have been shocked at the price of books as your wrote out your own check. Neither the state nor the federal government has an interest in whether you further your education to the magnitude that they cared about your first twelve years. Our society asks young people to do the conceptual equivalent of jumping from one rim of the Grand Canyon to the other between June when they graduate high school and August when they enter college, so drastic is the shift in responsibility for one's education. No one has more of a stake in your education than you do. If you choose to be here, then commit to that choice, as others will not compel you. You must find your own motivation.
As part of this ownership, consider something that is not so easy to understand. You will meet your professors next week, people who have between three and six years of education beyond the degree that you begin to work on next Monday morning. They have found something enlivening and liberating in their own disciplines, and they are eager to pass it onto you with enthusiasm. Their ultimate devotion, however, is to the standards in their disciplines, and they are obligated to evaluate your work according to those standards. You will find professors helpful, but not insistent that you learn. Professors have no obligation to "get you through." Education simply won't work if other people want it for us more than we want it for ourselves.
A second element for success in college I wish I had known is about the one quality that would help me more than any other, a habit that I now call "dailyness." More than intelligence or flair, the ability to attend to things on a daily basis is what gets us through the many responsibilities we take on in college. Study every day, understand your professors' expectations before you receive some dreadful grade, seek help, learn to ask for it. Have all the reading done before class, start early on papers and allow time to re-write, finish papers several days before they are due so you have time to reflect upon and enjoy what you have written. I've taught college for some 25 years, and I've seen a number of young people fail. Did they fail because they weren't smart enough? No. They didn't do the necessary work. Smart people fail all the time. It's commonplace. In college, as in life, the people who persist are the ones who succeed.
The third element that I wish I had understood concerns the purpose of college. Put succinctly, why are we in college? What are we doing this for? I have to admit that I was a little fuzzy on why I was going to college, and as I look back I realize it was more because my parents wanted it for me than because of any clear understanding I had of what college meant.
Although there is no doubt that many of you are in college to secure a good job, I am hoping to convince you that the purpose is much larger than just career success. Yes, I acknowledge that finding meaningful and well-paying work is worrisome--one of my chief concerns in my young life was how I would earn my living. I understood that someone would pay me to wait on tables. How clearly I realized that if I worked as a motel maid someone would give me money. But would anyone ever pay me to write a report, to analyze something, to give a speech? When I was a freshman I hardly thought it possible that people might someday pay me to think.
If I could ask you to trust me on one thing, it is this. Most of you will eventually have some measure of the material possessions that you yearn for now, things that might be motivating you to come to college. A decent house to live in, a way to support children, or perhaps a lifestyle where you choose travel and adventure are all within your potential. Most people manage to secure at least a portion of those kinds of dreams. Just for a moment, trust me and put career concerns on a shelf. As the semesters roll by, occasionally take them down and assess whether you are nearing an envisioned goal, but try to put them aside as you pursue your education. Career goals should not eclipse the real reason for college.
Education, more than anything else, helps people cope with life, and after all the career success which anyone in the industrialized world can hope for is accorded you, your education will continue to help you deal with whatever unique future awaits you.
Sometimes when I tell people I teach college students they say, "Ah, college students. They have nothing to worry about. Nothing has ever happened to them." I disagree. I do not think that your present time of life is gilded, that you are without worries or pressures or that you have been untouched by life. Students in my classes reveal what is important to them in their choice of topics for speeches. One Rocky student has a sibling with childhood leukemia who may very well die from it. In the last couple of years I have heard at least four speeches on breast cancer, two by students whose mothers now struggle with the disease, and one whose sister has it, another whose life is foreshadowed with worries of breast cancer herself. One student gave a speech on what downsizing in an American corporation means to a family. Not motivated by just broad theoretical concerns, he had watched his father struggle with a substandard, almost humiliating job, and he articulated what happens to the stability of family life when employment is jeopardized. Numerous times students have referred to the effects of divorce upon children. Having watched their own parents play out a bitter human drama, these speakers were credible due to hard-won experience.
In short, life is happening to you, just as it is happening to me and to everyone around us. And you, like me, are wondering about it. What constitutes ethical behavior? Why does evil often triumph? Are there moral imperatives? Do the schools, the churches, and the government offer the guidelines that I should myself adopt? What, if anything, does life mean? How can I best live life?
Your education will allow you to reflect rationally, not just emotionally, on your life condition and on what is happening to you as you ask these important questions. Your education will help you to understand your life in terms of all human life, as one point in the whole complexity of the human drama, as one person among millions who have looked at the stars at night, pondering similar thoughts. And to understand that even though our personal lives are of consequence to us, not one of us is irreplaceable. For whatever powerfully positive or powerfully negative experiences await you, education will help you, very simply, to cope.
So, I hope that you take early ownership of your education, acquire a habit of dailyness, and comprehend that the real value of a college education lies not in mere career preparation but in empowering us to cope with and fully live our lives. In the next few days you will have many exciting experiences. I hope that, along with whatever else that occurs as you fully enter the adult world, you begin to fall in love with learning, to revere its power, and to take that power as your own.