People like to say that college is the best time of your life. Four years ago, as I lay in bed after the first day of NSO, listening to the quiet snores of my super awesome roommate while reliving the craziness of that first day in my head, I knew there was no way that Stanford wouldn’t end up being the best time of my life.
There is much in the air this year about the place of the humanities at Stanford and about the optimal place of the humanities in an undergraduate education. First, there is no gainsaying that despite its nationally recognized quality, and despite real sympathy for it on the part of many non-humanist colleagues, the humanities faculty is not at the center of Stanford’s life — far from it. Enrollments have been declining for decades, and we humanists are sometimes taken to task by the University leadership for failing to counter this trend — the expression of a nation-wide trend in a university that is furthermore situated in the holy land of technology, Silicon Valley.
Life was good. I passed my employment drug screen, I met up with my friend Dina, and I sat under the sunshine at Tresidder sipping a delicious iced latte. To top it off, I had just received a $3,500 check in the mail. There was a small problem — I had no idea who the check was from, since it was mailed from a Cathy, issued by a Kelly, and signed by an Olivia — but hey, it had my name in the “Pay to the order of” line, so it legitimately belonged to me.
As the College Board prepares to roll out its revamped Advanced Placement (AP) program in the 2012-13 academic year, Stanford plans to retain its current policy on AP credit, which is heavily biased toward the sciences and mathematics.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about whether or not IHUM should be replaced, and if so, how.
I’ve also been made aware of several conversations about how Stanford students don’t know how to deal with failure. I’m surprised no one asked my opinion about either of these issues, because I’ve got the perfect idea to deal with both at once
Students tend to scoff at the word “participation,” especially when it’s written on a syllabus with a big percentage of their grade. But it is, in math, English, language, biology and chemistry, a profoundly good thing…
My freshman experience has been vastly different than most as, I am proud to admit, I am one person of the roughly 5 percent of the freshman class who decided to participate in SLE, Stanford’s yearlong Structured Liberal Education program…
The point of education is deep learning, learning that is integrated into how we think and understand, that is multiplied outside the classroom and placed in moral and reflective contexts. Letter grades are there to provide a backdrop incentive for more of that learning to happen…