For our Honors scholarship candidates, a piece of unsolicited advice

You know that place on the application where it asks you to write about the achievement you're most proud of? Consider not using it to tell us about your 4.0 GPA.

Tell us about that cool science project you did. Tell us how you're always starting novels and you finally finished one. Tell us how you got promoted to manager at your job. Tell us about the first meal you cooked by yourself. Tell us how you took care of your grandmother when she was dying. Tell us about the time you protested that awful policy at your school and succeeded in getting it changed. Or tell us how you didn't succeed, but you still think it was the right thing to do.

Tell us about something real. (Numbers on a transcript are not real.) Tell us about something that will stay with you. (Your 4.0 will not stay with you. One muffed test, or one cranky teacher, and it's gone forever. You will not miss it.)

If you must tell us about your grades, tell us about how you blew off ninth grade geometry for half a semester and panicked when you realized your midterm average was a 47% and your parents were absolutely going to kill you when they found out, and then you buckled down and turned yourself into a geometry machine for the next nine weeks and managed to bring your final grade up to a hard-won C. And that was how you realized you were actually good at math when you could be bothered to put in the time and effort.

Oh wait, that wasn't you, that was me. (They let me into college anyway. They even let me be a professor, eventually.) And it happened back in 1991, before parents could check their kid's grades online every single night and find out about every missed homework assignment at once; back when teachers could assign an F and make it stick.

I think I see the problem here...

Fleeing the country (with students)

So, I have not been blogging about this because I didn't want to jinx it, and it has been touch and go whether we could get and keep enough students for the trip to make, but I think it is time to make it official: In less than two months, a colleague and I will be leading our first study abroad trip. We'll be flying out of Nearest Large City to our destination -- let's call it Green Country* -- spending a few days in the capital city hitting the tourist sites pretty heavily, going to Quieter City and staying there for three weeks, and then heading back to the capital for another week before going home. Somewhere in there, we both teach accelerated summer-term classes. Mine, I must confess, is cobbled together from a single graduate course on Greenish literature that I took fifteen years ago and a few texts that I've taught in survey classes, and I am feeling massively underqualified to teach it -- but there has to be a first time for everything, and at least I do know a lot about figuring out the logistics of travel-on-the-cheap, which is certainly a relevant skill if not an academic one. Somehow I ended up in charge of all the budgeting and finances. (Yes, that is the sort of thing one might normally expect the study abroad office to handle. No, they don't. Long story.)

We originally planned this as an Honors trip, which would have come with a built-in audience with travel scholarships, but for various reasons that ended up not happening. So after recruiting like crazy, we're taking five non-Honors students from Misnomer U., and one retiree from the community who's coming along as an auditor, and one student from a neighboring university. That was exactly the number we needed for the trip to make, so we've been keeping our fingers crossed nobody would drop out. There isn't much of a culture of study abroad here outside of the Honors program, and most of the students don't have the money (nor are there scholarships available for non-Honors folk). But we made it. That feels like a triumph. And in the end, I'm glad that we're doing this outside of Honors. Because I love the Honors students, but they have so many opportunities handed to them that really should be available to all of our students, and this group has worked so hard to come up with the money themselves and find ways to make it all happen.

We just held an orientation session, in which we threw way too much information at our students and fielded questions ranging from the predictable ("Will I be old enough to drink in Green Country?"**) to the moderately wacky ("Can I bring an acoustic guitar in a gig bag?"***), and it's finally starting to feel real.

It's going to be interesting. Ever since grad school, I have been used to using travel as a way to get away from my everyday academic life, or even, secretly in my heart of hearts, regarding my academic life as a way to finance travel. And it has become a way to turn into a different person for a while, one who doesn't give a damn about student evaluations or readers reports, one who feels younger and less tied-down, takes bigger risks, strikes up quick friendships with strangers and then says goodbye as quickly. One thing I haven't ever tried to do is combine these two lives. (I'm wondering, now, what sort of teacher I will become in Green Country, where our classes will be taught here-there-and-everywhere -- in our lodgings, maybe outdoors sometimes, maybe in the pub -- and whether I will bring that teaching persona back with me.)

* No, not Greenland. We're nowhere near that exotic.
** Yes, you will. Hopefully you won't do anything stupid.
*** Well, you COULD, but we really aren't sure you want to.

of travel and education

So, as I hinted in my last post, a friend and I are hoping to put together a summer study-abroad course for the Honors program next year, although I won't know until fall whether it's going to be approved or not. Summer programs are the only kind of study abroad we have at Misnomer U.; anything during the regular semester is too long, too much time away from regular coursework, maybe also too scary for our students. So the Spanish program used to do one-month immersion programs in Mexico, until Mexico also became too scary; now they go to Spain instead. And the residential Honors program -- one of the few programs here that isn't run on a shoestring, thanks to a generous legacy from an alumna -- spends a month in various, though most often English-speaking, destinations in western Europe. This is a required component of residential Honors, and it's also totally free for many of the students apart from food and incidental expenses, and heavily subsidized for the others (it depends on exactly which scholarship they hold).

In four years of interviewing applicants for the Honors scholarships, I've learned that this is a huge draw for some of them and a huge source of anxiety for some of the others -- there is usually at least one student in every group who says that they are not interested in residential Honors because the study abroad component scares them. Sometimes my co-interviewers have tried to talk them out of it; I have never done so, since there are always plenty of other students who would love to go on the trip, and I'd just as soon save the scarce slots in this program for the ones who do want them, badly. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the ones who don't want to travel are the ones who most need to do so. God knows, a lot of the fear seems to be passed down from parent to child -- and it was my good luck that I was born to parents who talked me out of being afraid, who took me to Europe and the Dominican Republic when I was a teenager, and then gave me the push I needed to go on that Christmas break trip to the Bahamas with my high school marine biology class (because in Fairfax County, Virginia -- a place that now seems very far away -- even public schools do that sort of class trip).

So I went to the Bahamas, and had a wonderful time. And then, when I was a sophomore in college, I went to Spain for a semester, and hated it for the first six weeks, and loved it for the last eight. I did everything wrong in some ways, being too shy to speak as much Spanish as I should have done or to socialize with strangers, but it was still life-changing. Spain was where I learned how to handle myself -- how to tell if that guy cat-calling you is harmless or scary, how to drink in bars without turning yourself into an obviously-drunk target, how to deal with police and insurance companies after your purse gets snatched, how to be a stranger in a strange land. And it was reading Lorca on the all-night train to Granada, and feeling the hush that falls over people when they're in the presence of Guernica, and going to see El dia de la bestia without English subtitles and wondering what the hell that was all about. And it was orange trees, and lilacs, and little dishes of olives, and fireworks, and dirty city beaches, and a blizzard of pigeons in the square behind the cathedral.

We don't give our students all of that. We don't even give them a new language to dream in. We give them a lot of activities and excursions, and probably not even enough time to feel displaced. We give them, more or less, what my parents gave me on my first whistle-stop tour of Europe -- a glimpse, a taste, a safe space in which to see a little of the world. And maybe it's just as well; maybe that is what they need first, and bigger adventures can come later.