A few Facebook groups… (Suzanne)

…that I’ve joined lately include ‘My education is getting in the way of my learning’, ‘I’ve thought about dropping out of law school at least ten times today’ and ‘Every time you write parallel fifths, Bach kills a kitten’.

Now, that last group has absolutely no relevance to what I’m going to talk about in this post. But the others reflect a great deal about what I’ve been thinking about in the past few days. I’ve noticed that, particularly in my law lectures, there is a great deal of teaching to the test when it draws closer to exam time, almost as much as, or more than, there was in high school. Now, I understand the impetus for wanting your students to do well on standardised tests in high school, because after all, high schools base their reputation on how well students do in exams and the consequent university placements. But when you’re in university, and the point is to actually drill something into your thick skull for the general idea of it and not for some other end, and when everyone getting great marks means grade inflation, not excellence, I have to wonder what the point of spending so much time on exam preparation is.

I mean, it’s great that my lecturers are so thorough in making their expectations clear and providing help for exams. And this whole spiel is probably coming from a bit of a hypocritical standpoint, given that their exam tips are probably going to save my butt when I walk into LMR with no idea about what the heck I’m going to do. But I came into university expecting that I would finally be able to learn something purely for the sake of it, and instead find that students here are still motivated more by a two digit number on a piece of paper than by the prospect of opening their minds. Call me naive, or stuck up, or a kooky intellectual purist, but I find it incredibly dispiriting, when, after the LMR lecturer announces that there will not be an essay on the social implications of tort reforms on the test, students ask if that means that they will not have to learn about them. I find it disheartening that when the lecturer tells the class that everyone in law has done incredibly well in school, that the general first reaction is to stress over the loss of standing in the hierarchy of academic achievement, and not to consider the wider implication that now that you’re in a pool of intellectual equals and superiors there is a remarkable opportunity to have the kind of sophisticated discussions you could only dream about in high school and to really learn from each other without the kind of constraints you’d have in a smaller pond. (Sorry. I know that sounds incredibly cliched.) Cut throat grade grubbing and teaching to the exam might have had their purposes in secondary education, but they do not belong in higher education. Period.

Anyway, the whole thing which sparked this rant was an exchange information session this afternoon. The rep from the University of California talked about how the policy at UC Santa Cruz was to assess all subjects on a pass/fail basis, and to provide detailed and personalised written feedback to students where it was necessary, with similar detailed letters of recommendation being used in lieu of transcripts for graduate program applications. There are a number of other American universities which use a similar policy, notably Reed University in Oregon, and MIT for all its first year students, and generally it’s found to be a great way of easing transition to university and encouraging a supportive, rather than cutthroat, environment. It’s not very practical to implement this system for Melbourne, because it only really works with relatively small schools with few students to write evaluations about. But it’s a nice thought nonetheless.

So, to change the subject and touch on why I joined that second group there, I’m wondering whether I really actually want to be doing law. (It really has nothing to do with anything in the previous ramble, because that’s a general thing that applies to all faculties.) It’s just that I originally chose law because my parents made me pick a backup to music, and I really didn’t want to do arts, creative arts, mediacomm, or commerce because I was a hardcore science and maths geek who hated economics, my only non-language humanities or social science subject, in high school (For the curious, I did IB with maths, physics, and music at higher level, and English, Chinese, and economics at standard level. Everyone in my family is a scientist or mathematician, so I also got to play with equations and things a lot as a kid). I figured that since law would be logical and all that it would suit me better than the other options. But now that I’m here, I’ve discovered that there are people actually doing music/science, although the degree doesn’t exist in the books (it’s a complicated setup where you do both part time and transfer credits from one to the other), and I’m tempted to switch once the faculty of music replies to my email about how you actually go about setting up such a degree. I just feel like all the maths I did as a kid, all the education, and all the interest in the stuff is being wasted by doing law, a subject for which I have only a lukewarm passion.

But even that’s not what I really want. What I really want is to be able to have my music degree, and then double it with a broad, generalist degree, because I really don’t know what I want to do outside of music. And the heart of it is that I really want to be good at everything. I want the writing skills and the critical reading ability and the questioning and thinking around fuzzy and unclear issues that you get in law. I want the rigorous logical manipulation skills you get in maths. I want the problem solving from science or engineering. I want the appreciation of beauty you get from the arts. I want to go on exchange, and travel and live in all sorts of places so that I can look at everything from a different angle. And then I want to get into a position where those will be of some use to the rest of the world.

Bah. I hate that I can’t pick any electives in my course until 4th year (when the rest of you have probably all graduated). I have so much fun designing my future and education. I’m kind of doing it now, on a little bit of an unofficial basis, with an unofficial English literature class (i.e. reading books again, starting with my floor tutor’s book – she’s a published author, and then moving on to some Russian stuff like Anna Karenina), an unofficial Chinese class (i.e. reading books in Chinese) and an unofficial film class (watching all these random movies from different cultures in other people’s rooms), and I want to squeeze in some time to finish some music compositions I started a while ago, and to finish writing a story, plus I have all these random calculus and music theory books I brought over, just in case I needed them, which I probably won’t get around to looking at because I’d like to have some slightly less dorky hobbies too. And I really should stop thinking that revision lectures are breaks — just because there is no new reading doesn’t mean I should stop looking at the books altogether. I have weird study attitudes. I find exam period relaxing because I only have to go into class on the day of the exam and nobody gives me assignments during them.

As a side note, why on earth are Australians so behind the times? Nobody here has Facebook, which, back home, would have been incredibly weird for someone with any semblance of a social network. Certainly, in the States, you’d definitely be one of the weird smelly kids if you weren’t constantly procrastinating on the site. (For those of you who don’t know, and the fact that there are such people goes a long way towards supporting my point, Facebook is a social networking site where you and your friends all have profiles and send each other messages and things. It’s pretty useful when everyone’s on it, because you can send out mass invitations to events to everyone on your friends list, and it reminds you of all their birthdays and crud.) Here it seems to be mostly a Myspace craze, which back home, is uncool for anyone past their early teens, because the majority of people who use Myspace are either a) 12 year old girls, or b) 40 year old men stalking those 12 year old girls.

Oh, random plug: I’ll be in the chamber orchestra that accompanies Trinity College Choir for their concert of Haydn’s Paukenmasse on Saturday, 5:30, Trinity College Dining Hall, $15. Watch!

Man, I write long posts.