Clarification Appended
I wish you were a more interesting student. You sit in my class 28 times during the semester and say nothing. Or if you do ask a question, you want me to repeat something so you can write it all down. Or you want to tell me that the reading or movie I assigned sucked. Or you want to attack something your classmate just said.
When you come by the office, you are only there to drop off a paper, pick up an exam, find out when something is due or complain about a grade. If I've asked you to come to my office, then you politely and cautiously answer my questions and leave.
I'm bored in class. I'm bored during office hours. Where did my intellectual life go?
I'm exaggerating, of course. Year in, year out, AU is a great place to teach and learn, and every semester, I develop deep intellectual friendships with my students. But I'm hoping to provoke some of you into becoming one of those interesting students I meet every semester that make teaching so very rewarding.
The interesting student comes to class with a real question, something that she has been thinking about since she left class last time. Or when she comes to the office to drop off a paper, she has a question that she has been thinking about for awhile. Or even better, she comes by the office not to drop off something or because she has to. She comes because some question just won't let go of her until she gets it off her chest.
And it's a real question. It's not about facts. It's not about right and wrong. It's about intellectual depth. Questions are about quests, after all. Journeys. You travel because you want go somewhere and get something. Maybe you thought of college as exactly that kind of place, imagining that you would at last meet people who cared about ideas and that you would have deep conversations about life's questions.
But you didn't count on all the things that frustrate those dreams. Required courses are boring. Classes with interesting course descriptions turn out to be oddly irrelevant to your real concerns. Any class before noon seems too early; classes after 2 p.m. are too late. Too much reading and too many papers mean you don't have time to mull over an idea before you are off to the next one. And the job you took to buy the books for college is not giving you enough time to read them, much less care about them.
But your years in college are precious, and you cannot let them slip by because you are too bored, tired or busy to make real education happen. You will never have time quite like you do now, time when you can really get to know an idea from all sides.
You came to college to become an intellectual. Now act like it. An intellectual turns over ideas in his head like you'd turn a rock over in your hand. He wants to know what will happen if he turns the rock on its edge, spin it, cut with it or lean it against something. He wants to know whether he can dig with it or carve something into it, whether it melts or freezes, whether he can squeeze something out of it and whether it pings or breaks when he taps it with something.
Maybe you cannot treat every class this way, but find some times each semester to come into class or into my office with something that feels fresh and new to you. Come with the fervent belief that no one has put two ideas together the way you have that day. And you might be right. Because you want to see new things, you might have made something new possible.
I can't wait to see you in class tomorrow.
Michael L. Manson is a College of Arts and Sciences professor in the Department of Literature. You can reach him at mmanson@american.edu.
Clarification: Due to an editing error, the headline of this column in The Eagle's March 5 print edition misspelled "You're" as "Your." The online version of the column was corrected to reflect the correct spelling. The Eagle regrets the error.
