Somewhere in the dark woods of Hanover, there’s a graveyard of every class I didn’t take. When I buried Formal Logic, Modern Iran, the Hebrew Bible and every economics class after Econ 1 in that graveyard, I mourned the ideas I’d never study. But in my last 10-week term at Dartmouth, instead of squeezing the last drop of value out of my tuition, I’m using a rare opening in my schedule to take, well, nothing. And what have I gained from my two-course term?
I have the time to write this reflection, for one thing. But not just to write it, to really write it. Reflect on it. Sit on it for two weeks before I even start drafting. Send in a final draft full of ideas that could only occur to me as I ran up against the word count again and again and had to cut column inches. In other words, taking a two-course term is giving me time to think.
At Dartmouth, I’ve only had time to think in breathy gasps between midterms, mock trial seasons and job applications. I came into college, like many students at top universities, fresh off the hamster wheel of accruing accolades. There was an art to the Ivy League application process, and anyone who ended up here learned it: do a lot, do it well, and make sure everything you do fits a cohesive story that makes you unique compared to the other 20,000 applicants. It required a lot of memorization, time crammagement (like time management, but the goal is to fit in as many things as humanly possible) and faking it ’til you made it.
I’ve never fully been able to fully shake that mentality, and I’ve seen that the same is true for many of my Dartmouth classmates. Even with so little time, we manage to convince ourselves that more is better. More commitments, more responsibilities, more classes. More, more, more.
In his 2009 “Solitude and Leadership” lecture, cultural critic and former Yale University English professor William Deresiewicz summed up the lifestyle of many Ivy League students today.
“It’s not that my students were robots,” he said. “Quite the reverse. They were intensely idealistic, but the overwhelming weight of their practical responsibilities, all of those hoops they had to jump through, often made them lose sight of what those ideals were. Why they were doing it all in the first place.”
I think we reach for more at Dartmouth — that extra class, club or even pong game — because being constantly in motion is more comfortable than allowing ourselves time to think critically or dig deeply into our assignments. A friend of mine recently explained her rationale for taking multiple four-course terms while writing a thesis in her senior year: if I do this and write a thesis I’m not proud of, I can blame it on being busy. If I make the time and still think my thesis is bad, it’s a reflection on my abilities.
For people whose self-worth has been built up by teachers, parents and admissions committees telling us we’re good students, a perceived failure like that cuts sharper than the Hanover winds through a cracked window in the Choates on a February morning.
But in trying to ‘crammage’ our time, we let our deep thinking muscles atrophy. As Deresiewicz argues, “Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information… Developing your own ideas.” I’ve learned a lot in my four-course terms, but this two-course term is the first time I’ve been able to prioritize deep thinking.
So here’s my pitch: do some four-course terms, if for no other reason than to learn how to effectively skim a reading and talk confidently about a movie you’ve never seen. Do your three-course terms. Finish your major, try new subjects and take some cool classes.
But pick a term — sophomore summer, senior spring or something in between — to leave a gaping hole in your schedule. The biggest tragedy of them all would be graduating from this place without thinking about what we’re really learning.
