Op-Ed: My schooling is getting in the way of my education

There’s a bulletin board on the third floor of Bi-Hall that lists upcoming lectures in science. I passed by it a few weeks ago and noticed a lecture on motivation and brain levels of dopamine. I thought I might go.

Then I went to class, was reminded of how much homework I have to do, was assigned more work and was thoroughly confused by some equation about Gibbs free energy that I didn’t understand during class and would have to work out on my own later. And I had four tests that week.

It wasn’t the only week this semester that I became nervous my brain might ooze from my face, and it also wasn’t the only time that I felt my learning was compromised by my workload. Learning would be a lot easier if problem sets weren’t all designed to take over 12 hours, if I didn’t have what I consider “busy work” and hundreds of pages of reading, and it would also be easier if I were granted the headspace to actually think about the material.

I once asked a professor why the lot of them assign us so much work. His response surprised me: students are not actually expected to do everything on his syllabus. When I asked why he would bother, then, to stress us out even more by assigning work that he knows we probably cannot get done, he claimed that the students most interested in the material will do all of it, and that this difference in effort often separates the As from the Bs. It’s somewhat valid, but an unnecessary and unwarranted method of distinguishing students, I think, and I knew then that I would never take a class of his.

My theory is that if I had less assigned work I would actually get to think about class material, maybe go to any one of the random film screenings on campus, or maybe even devote enough time into the work I crank out to take some pride in it. Of course, that’s giving me a bit too much credit — if I had less work to do, I might also “just” hang out with my friends more — but, quite frankly, what’s the point of bringing together 2,400 curious and interesting (and interested) people if we don’t even have time to talk to each other? And how much of what I’ve learned here that is actually important — you know, the personal growth part of our education, the part that is too often left in the shadows of our formal education — have I learned from my coursework? Maybe, generously, 30 percent. I believe I have learned the rest from my peers.

That is not to say that I don’t value my classes. I really, really do. I am fascinated and in awe of my major every day; that’s why I picked it, and I often brag about the breadth of courses at my feet here to people who haven’t even asked. But because I have so much work to do, I don’t get adequate time to think about course material, to process it or to integrate it into my daily wanderings around campus. With so much to do, I get too entwined in academics to really learn or really see what I think is the point: that academics are only one facet of education. And they are an important one, but I do not see them as the definition of my college experience. That comes from everything else.

So what happens when I have too much to do? Lately, I’ve noticed that I don’t attempt anything because it feels like no amount of effort, no matter how concentrated, will even dent the gigantic mass o’ stuff to get done. The mountain of homework that obstructs my desk every night can even squelch my interest in the material.

The sheer irony of that is at least a little striking, don’t you think? I am a pretty darn motivated person if I say so myself, and I am finally in the midst of the kinds of courses I wanted but lacked in high school, but the load can get so overwhelming that I don’t even want to learn anymore. Perhaps this applies to you, too. I would tell you more about how all that works in my brain, about levels of dopamine and other neurotransmitters, but I couldn’t go to that lecture.