And it is beautiful.

The blog below was written by Brianna Smith ('19), who traveled with me to New Orleans for the National Collegiate Honors Council conference a week or so ago.  While  there, she presented with me on ways of encouraging students to talk in a seminar class, she moderated other presentations, and she attended many others.  We saw some of the sights and talked a lot about Honors at FLCC.  These are the thoughts she had after that event - and she will be coming to see us in the Spring 2020 semester to share what she learned and has experienced as an Honors Studies Scholar who has since transferred on to a four year school.  

Nurse, doctor – pediatrician, to be exact. An inkling of something more, words on parchment, a secret fostered but never able to fully manifest.

Writer, reader, uncertain fates, how do you take a hope and make it into something tangible? Journalist? Journalist! But, no… The pull of a well-worn cover calls, beckoning in the same manner of an open classroom door, an opportunity to offer something more lasting than any physical gift, a chance to educate, to open minds.

When you ask a child what they want to be, their dreams are often outrageous, aspirational. Dreams, after all, don’t need to be about reality, but about the deepest desires of the heart. I was the opposite, I bound by practicality, by fear. Honors taught me to dream again. Before crossing that threshold I had scorned those who chose majors of passion because I did not understand what it was to have faith in oneself, to see the potential in dreams. I had always loved to learn, but I didn’t understand how to learn only because I loved it.

Honors taught me I could. More than that, it taught me letting go could be safe, slowly weeding out the fears that had grown like cancerous ivy, blocking out the light.

But then, as we all must I stepped back to continue my education, knowing the transition would be difficult. I didn’t realize at the time how much I would struggle. Honors had provided me not only with a classroom, but a community. In the chaos of transferring and the adaptation it demands, I had lost my vision. When I set foot in the first session at the National Collegiate Honors Council Conference this November I wasn’t sure what to expect not only of the conference, but of myself. I hadn’t realized how much being back in an Honors-driven environment after certain constraints had caused me to take a step back, would truly affect me.

It was like seeing the sun again. The doubt I had been feeling, a common parasite in the education experience, was extracted. I had forgotten for a time what education was truly about, and fell prey for a moment to the dialogue that college is only here to provide students with job-training. In slipping into this trap I had forgotten to remember how much I loved learning. The spirit of inquiry had for a second faded as pressure to perform and assert myself in a new environment grew.

One of the sessions for which I moderated at the conference focused on how the university has become part of a capitalist machine, churning out students for the world of adult employment. It was this trap which I had fell prey to for a moment, and which students all around me lose themselves to. In pushing for college education as a necessity for success (a patently false narrative) we generate students who lack inspiration, who do not understand what it is to love learning. Rather they seek the same pattern that we see more and more in middle and high-schools: to find the right answer, to get the right grade, to make it through. This dialogue that we’ve created around higher education doesn’t empower the student to learn for the love of learning, but teaches them how to run through motions, dulling the beautiful landscape of education.

Honors is the solution. I think that often when students hear the word honors their mind bristles with fear and preconceived notions. They worry Honors isn’t for them, that it is unobtainable, that the students are high-achieving in a way that they never can be. But I’d like to believe the opposite. Honors doesn’t just draw in high-achieving students, it helps to create them. The Honors layout at FLCC is unique because it does not require students to have a specific GPA when they enter into the program, but only that they work towards an aspirational goal to receive their Honors Designation. This goal is often so much more obtainable than students think. But more than this, Honors provides students with a network of professors and faculty who are in love with what they do. One of the comments I often heard from professors in my years at Finger Lakes was that they were there to teach, not to research, not to publish. To teach. It’s funny how that can seem like a novel idea when you step into higher education.

As students I think we get caught up in simply trying to make it through in the quickest amount of time with the most success so that we can get a job and hopefully one day earn a livable wage.  This dialogue of college as a stepping stone to success forgets that the university was once designed to foster learning beyond its walls. Honors combats this amnesia because it sets out to create lifelong learners, instilling the ever-important spirit of inquiry. Because it teaches students that there is more to life than a right or wrong answer, that learning for the pleasure of learning is beautiful. own several shirts now that bear one significant reminder: stay curious. Because at FLCC that’s all you have to be: curious. We don’t force students to distinguish themselves by arbitrary measures of what they presume is their intelligence. Rather, the hallowed spaces of our classrooms are open-air arboretums, temples with no locks, no chains on the doors. Because learning has never, never been about a number on a scale. Learning at its heart is about the insatiable drive of curiosity.

When academia wonders how we, members of a learning community, combat the tidal wave of economically-driven students, I truly believe that Honors and what it stands for is the answer. Engaging students by creating a safe environment for them to ask questions not only of the material, but of themselves, is the first step. This brings up a number of questions: how do we make Honors accessible not only on our campus, but to all students across the educational landscape? How do we appeal to students who might not know that Honors is for everyone, not just a select few? I don’t have answers to these questions, not yet. But what I do have is a belief, something I had forgotten for a moment, but which is singing deep inside of my soul now with an sound which cannot be silenced: Honors works. Honors matters. Honors is how we remind students to learn. Not because it has a pretty title, not because it requires success as a pre-requisite – it doesn’t. But because Honors believes in students. Because it gives them a goal. Because it asks them to look inside of themselves to find the answers.  We talk a lot in Honors about the importance of reflection. Often times, the first question students are asked is: why are you here? There is no right answer. More importantly, there is no wrong answer. And always, always there is hope that Honors can remind students of something crucial: learning is for everyone. And it is beautiful.