I recently had a conversation with my photography professor. Bear with me. The last class of the semester had come and ended with the sound of shuffling feet out the doors of the room, just as any other class, and the forty other students in there carried on, assuming to never have to deal with the class or the teacher ever again. I admit, it can be a weight off the shoulders to hear that silent bell toll, ringing the death knell of a particularly hated course. However, in this class, it felt wholly undeserved. Our professor is young, nowhere close to tenured, barely full-time, and giving it their all.
“It’s hard to really feel a passion for teaching the stuff you love,” they began, “when almost all of your students are only here to satisfy a gen-Ed credit, and can’t be bothered to think creatively.”
The class just happened to satisfy three Gen-Ed credits for me too, but I took it also as a challenge to my little hobby of photography and I learned a hell-of-a-lot about the craft. From day one it was evident that our professor not only knew what they were talking about, but was passionate about it. They shared their work, knowledge, and connections with and for us, and we often met them with cold silence, moreso awkward quiet. And I remembered during that conversation that we were all paying to be quiet, paying hundreds of dollars for this course to sit there boredly and get a credit.
How could we be missing out on this opportunity so massively?
Evan Puschak wrote in his book Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions that as a younger student, he did not care about learning. Shocker, I know. However, he makes a pointed critique at the education system for making him this way, and his own familial influence. “Did my world want me to know the significance of irony in Pride and Prejudice? The atomic structure of various metals? Roman emperors? Not really. It wanted good report cards."1 All this to fit the assumed life structure of: get good grades to get good SAT scores to get into a good college to get more good grades to look good for potential employers to get a good job and make good money to maybe one day have an okay retirement. Not once in high school do I remember learning what a vocation was, and it never seemed like it was on Puschak’s plate or mine growing up.
It is this mentality— that all education is just a stepping stone to the perennial “job” of the future— that prevails often in university classrooms. We as students fool ourselves that the classes have nothing to teach us, only something to offer us: a grade.
In my historiography class I struggled to learn, or get any enjoyment out of it because I was falling on my own sword— or pen— and worrying too much about notes. One day, as if apothesized, I came to a relization that became my gospel. I stopped taking notes. I brought myself to the classroom, listened, and engaged with the lectures. Suddenly I was learning leagues more. Moreso, I was enjoying it.
Why not enter a photography class and try? ‘Trying is harder than getting by, and I won’t be using these skills ever again.’ And? What is the risk of taking the class at face value, a place to learn and challenge oneself, and trying in it? That you might learn something you never use, that you might become a more well rounded person, that you might find something interesting and that would make you a boring person somehow, that you might enjoy it? Learning is about more than wandering into the florescent lights of a comfy gig at some alphabet-soup corproation or office.
So I encourage students these days to bring themselves to a class— you can get away with this in the humanities at least— and leave your notebook aside, don’t worry about scrambling to get this info down. Then, just listen, be present for the lecture. See how interesting it becomes, see how passionate these professors can be about what they’re telling you. I have a history professor who always says, “I’m doing this for you guys too, you know?” He’ll say it with a smirk, playing it off as a joke, but he means that. He’s not just there to ego-stroke and chat away for his own sake, he wants the students to find that passion too. Professors desperately try to break our shells and get us to be interested and engaged. They want you to be creative, and think analytically for you!2
If that “job” is already in your life, or is something you’re working towards, that’s fine. Make learning your vocation. Who says being a student, or a learner-for-life can’t be a kind of job? I realize that not everyone wants, or can do this, and I say this from a place of privilage, but learning is not a death sentence if you enjoy it. We are not— for the most part— in high school where it is assumed you will produce good numbers for the school to be handed more money. We are fully self-aware, cognisant humans. Take advantage of all that space up in your brain. Learn to love to learn. Do you follow me? Let’s see what Puschak has to say:
Discovering a love of learning felt like a rebirth. That nagging sense of pointlessness yielded to a promise of substance in every direction. The world lit up with questions, and questions generated questions. It’s an exhilarating and terrifying experience to walk the road of your ignorance. Learning, you learn, is not really a process of expanding your mind, but watching it shrink against all there is to know. It's humbling, but addicting.3
I took an Intro to Creative Writing course this semester— even though I’ve taken three advanced creative writing classes already— and seeing the eyes of university freshmen narrow and dart nervously from person to person when they are challanged to write a scene about whatever they want is an experience I very much recommend. It is a tad bit disheartening, though, when they frantically begin to ask questions like “how do we start it,” “what should we be trying to prove” and “do you want citations?” Everyone expects regimented academic punishment and not an experience to go beyond what they expect of college.
Education of any kind does not necessarily need to be something for people who are described as “gluttons of punishment.” It’s okay to learn, to love to learn, and to want to learn, and on the flip side, I guess it isn’t all that bad to want a break from it all too.
Puschak describes that after discovering his love of learning he found direction “into a new life, free from GPA anxiety, off the checkpointed path. It made college more enriching, but it went beyond that. Reading no longer felt like a chore. I hopscotched book to book, chasing enthusiasms that moved faster than I could. I found new passions and complex ideas and finer shades of meaning.”4 I think then that, when I am not learning, I am not living, but living is all about learning, and doing. While I fool myself into feeling stupid at every turn, and reminding myself of a Mary Oliver line that "idleness can be a form of dying..." I do have to come down sometimes. I cannot always read, cannot always learn, cannot always be engaged. It's okay to relax too.
Greg Ashman who writes about education on Substack has this to say:
I am interested in education because I am interested in human agency. I want to equip students with the tools they need to go on the adventures they choose. These adventures may be vocational — the way many view the purpose of education — but they may also be intellectual, philosophical or even spiritual. In a sense, it is futile for me to try to anticipate labels for these adventures because I cannot know what future humans equipped with the superpower of cultural curated knowledge will embark upon. That’s why education is exciting.5
We all learn, and need to learn, and we can do it on our own. Though we can’t all be autodidacts and self-taught geniuses, we can be students.
One of my favorite forms of learning is filling up my commonplace book, quotes, words, poems, annecdotes, the infrequent doodle. The pages slowly get filled, same with my brain. It’s a fun little way to learn.
I’ll end it with a nice quote from Rainer Maria Rilke’s letter’s, “That something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.”
Puschak, Evan Escape into Meaning. Simon and Schuster, 2022 p. 3
Trust me, I know there are plenty of professors who do not adopt this as their modus operandi.
Puschak, p. 5
Ibid, p. 5
Ashman, Greg, “Be more punk: Do it yourself intellectual movements”, Filling the Pail