Last week, something very unusual occurred: I was given a writing assignment by one of my students.  This particular student is also the Opinion editor of The Georgetonian, Georgetown College’s student newspaper (a very good — and very funny — student newspaper, I might add).  The assignment was to write an article comparing big schools, like Auburn, with small schools, like Georgetown.  You can read the article — and check out the rest of what The Georgetonian has to offer — here.

I’ve been thinking for a long time about education, and educational environments.  I think that every person needs something different when it comes to their education, and so I’m very glad that there are different educational environments.  The slogan of Sarah Lawrence College, my alma mater, is “You are different — so are we.”  I remember being thrilled by this when I read it, and I remember knowing very distinctly at that moment that Sarah Lawrence had the right educational environment for me.  I must admit that most of my beliefs about education come from my time at small schools — the Alabama School of Fine Arts, my high school, had an enrollment of three hundred while I was there, and Sarah Lawrence has an enrollment of one thousand three hundred undergraduate students.

I have realized, especially in the past few months, that there is a great deal of difference in small schools and big schools.  I will always be incredibly grateful for my experience at Auburn, and I will always look at my three years there fondly.  It seems strange to say this, as I was already 25 when I started working there (did I just reveal my age on the Internets?  It seems so.  Good Lord.  Please erase that figure from your mind immediately, if not sooner), but I feel as though I “grew up” during my time in Auburn — or, at least, that I “grew up” in terms of finding my presence in the classroom.  Auburn offered so many incredible possibilities, and I learned a great deal from my students there.  Where else would I have had the chance to teach Composition II to a section of Forestry majors?  How else would I have read such interesting papers about controlled burns, population control, and organic farming techniques?  My students at Auburn taught me a great deal, and I hope that I’m able to transfer what I learned from them successfully to this new environment.

It seems to me that what a small school offers is, first and foremost, a sense of community.  This sense of community can do a great deal for the teacher in the classroom.  I feel as though this sense of community leads to a kind of comfort that allows students to experiment; to take intellectual, artistic, and spiritual risks; and to try what they’ve never tried before.  This was certainly my experience at Sarah Lawrence: the environment made me brave enough to take classes I might not have taken elsewhere, in subjects from physics to philosophy to studio art.  This also seems to be the experience of my students here at Georgetown College.  This semester, I’ve watched with pride and not a small amount of awe as they pushed themselves to go further, dig deeper, to create and to think and to revise and to write and to do it all again, over and over, week after week.  I feel honored to be in the classroom with these students, and I can’t wait to see what they accomplish as the semester progresses.

I’ve also been inspired by their willingness to break new ground by travelling into unchartered territory myself: mostly, that wild and different world of prose.  I’ve been working steadily on a series of essays, and think I might just be getting somewhere.  Who would’ve thought?  A whole new world, without linebreaks!

Unfortunately, it seems that Gertrude Stein has also been inspired to try new behaviors herself:

Gertrude Stein explores the tabletop.

That may look like a feline expression of shame and dismay at having been caught where she is Absolutely Not Supposed to Be — on the kitchen table.  Should you be thinking this, you would be thinking the wrong thing.  This is, instead, a look of dismay that I would dare to bother her while she’s sitting on the table.  Does anyone know how to keep cats from tabletops?

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