Vol 3 No 3
Last week, the blog focused on vulnerability and how it’s
okay to be uncomfortable sometimes. As
a rule, I send the blog around to various folks, including Honors faculty. One of them. Dave McGuire, responded with
this:
[T]here is also a lot about self-discovery in Honors, how we
each have huge tracts of dimly sensed, vast shrouded tracts of as-yet unknown,
unrealized potential self that we sometimes yearn to plumb—also scary,
perhaps—we might find things we did not expect, or that contradict or threaten
the persona.
I love this idea of self-discovery as one of the
characteristics of Honors. It’s actually
folded into the idea of reflection and how, in Honors, we try to focus on ourselves
as learners in any context. By doing so,
we can break down the walls that separate one discipline from another and can
help us transfer learning strategies from one class to another. We also try to foster a sense of life-long
learning – that we will never stop being curious, being exploratory, being
passionate delvers into the world around us.
But perhaps one of the core aspects of this that is largely unstated is
the fact that it’s not learning in the sense that we are acquiring
knowledge. It’s experiencing the
world. It’s understanding as much as we
can. It’s resisting the urge to fall
into a resigned existence formed on habit and comfort. Thoreau once said that “[t]he mass of men
lead lives of quiet desperation” and this is the fate from which we would save
as many as we can. To do this – to experience
the world with all its glory and its grimness – we must also understand
ourselves. Sometimes, looking inward is
the hardest direct to look and doing so from the comfort of a supportive
classroom or a gathering of fellow students can ease that process.
It is a classroom in which a student can comfortably refer
to her own “gay little feminist heart” with no fear of reproach.
It is a reflective essay in which a student can realize that
the wrong environment “can throw [her] so off kilter that [she] do[es] not have
the mental capacity for anything other than mindlessly playing with [her] phone”
It’s a male student who realizes that a course that is
solely about women “may not affect me directly but certainly matter to me
greatly”.
It’s a student who comes to realize “[w]e are all motivated
by not only our mental state, but our circumstance” and who feels comfortable
discussing her own battles with mental illness in a class about women who face
the same battles and make horrific choices as a result.
Last week, I was at a scholarship dinner with the recipient
of an award and we happened to be seated at a table with the Provost of
FLCC. He asked her what it was about
Honors that was so appealing to her and she immediately responded with “Honors
is home.” From there, she went into a
lengthy description of what Honors courses, faculty, and students were like and
her passion for it was no less than her passion for conversation about her
major, her educational plans, and her desire to teach at a community college. I’ve seen so many students come through
Honors and have some powerful conversations about Tolkien, about Women Who
Kill, about the power of memoir, about the beauty of literature, about the
future of the world. But I’ve seen just
as many students share heart breaking and uplifting stories about who they are,
where they’ve come from, what they are afraid of, and the very things that make
them vulnerable.
Not that it is all the sort of thing that keeps me awake at
night worrying, or gives me goose bumps as I listen. Sometimes, it’s just a simple realization
that they love a subject more than they thought. Or that maybe math isn’t outside their
skillset. Or that writing papers doesn’t
have to be a painful chore every time.
Even these little self-discoveries are worth savoring, for they may be a
ripple in the pond that makes for big changes down the line. Or maybe, it just made that student's Monday a
little bit easier*.
Like a small boat
On the ocean
Sending big waves
Into motion
Like how a single word
Can make a heart open
I might only have one match
But I can make an explosion
