Lessons Learned from a Community College Transfer

You get out what you put in. That principle has always been true for me, and it’s one especially resonant in the field of learning. In this NY Times piece, Laura Pappano sheds an interesting light on the evolving relationship between four-year universities and two-year community college transfers. The slant of her writing is true. Students at community colleges have been unfairly overlooked by four-year universities in the past, and the expansion of their recruitment efforts to include community colleges is a welcome development. One of the reasons that Pappano points to for the recent evolution is that four-year institutions are finding that community college transfers firmly understand the input-output relationship of hard work. 

With that in mind, I thought it might be insightful to share a little bit about my own journey through higher education, which began at a community college, concluded at a four-year state university, and included a summer detour through the halls of New College, Oxford. What I took away from the experience is that mastery in education has little to do with content learning, but in learning how to learn, an effort that I continue to refine. 

I was lucky to find a professor at my community college who took the time to not only be a professor but also become my mentor. The class he taught was on social theory, but it touched on everything in the humanities, all of which became topics for discussion and debate when I would meet with him during early morning office hours. He respected my intellect but did me the favor of crushing it, needlessly at times, with the intent of goading me on. To challenge him, to distrust everything he said, to force him to defend his every position, in the same manner he forced me to. What he taught me was that learning wasn’t a passive absorption of facts from text or teacher, but a test of every idea I believed. I was certain of much less after those office hour debates, but the few ideas I retained were evergreen and more like scaffolding to be built upon.

My transfer to the four-year university that I eventually graduated from was somewhat disappointing. You could get lost in the sea of students and everything seemed driven by politics. But I got lucky by mistakenly enrolling in a graduate course as an undergrad. The professors who ran the sociology department at my college took in anyone who wanted to learn. They allowed me to sit in on graduate courses, despite the annoyance my endless questioning may have brought to some of the discussions, even though they frequently stirred up good debate. My mistake landed me in a setting where I could have the types of intellectual exchange that I had with my community college mentor.

During my time at Oxford, I studied critical theory with a dedicated tutor over the course of a summer. The workload was intended to break me. I recall one prompt in particular: “Were the Frankfurt School theorists bitterly pessimistic or expectantly optimistic with regard to their social outlook during their American phase?” I had a week to write an essay on two books, Minima Moralia and The Dialectic of Enlightenment, and be prepared to argue about it at next week’s session. A lot of what I remember from Oxford was the view outside the window above my desk—grey clouds and rain—but it was also there that I realized what I had been doing all throughout college.

I was creating situations for engagement. I was recreating the format of discussion and debate that was standard at an elite university like Oxford. I wasn’t learning material as much as I was challenging it to ensure it was worth learning. In essence, I was learning how to learn.

This is the experience that tutors at Intelligentsia aim to provide. The aim isn’t merely to help students preparing to take the SAT get better at selecting more correct answers, more of the time. Our aim is to provide exercises in prioritizing their cognitive effort, in deploying proper strategy to sort through information (most of it useless), in identifying the parts of a passage where a solution to a query might lay, and in recognizing when a problem has become a snag to set aside and return to later.

That’s what we put in. A sharper, more confident student is what we hope to get out.

— Jonathan Tupas

Read Laura Pappano’s full piece “Where 4-Year Schools Find a Pool of Applicants: 2-Year Schools” at NYTimes.com —>

Why We Write

In a 1974 issue of the New York Review of Books, Joan Didion authored a short essay about writing entitled, simply enough, “Why I Write.” Didion’s choice of title bore more than passing resemblance to an essay by George Orwell written some 28 years earlier, a fact she was in no way attempting to conceal.“Why I Write,” she claims, is “stolen” from Orwell — thieved because, as she puts it, she liked the way the words sounded. Here’s Didion:

you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this: 

I 

I 

I 

In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. 

For Didion, writing is an intensely personal act — it’s about the individual writer and their effort to convince the reader of their line on things. In this way, she echoes Orwell, who suggested that writing had more than a little to do with ego. 

It’s more than this, though. 

For Orwell writing is political too— a way of staking one’s place in history, of arguing for what’s right and decent. And for Didion it’s a way of processing those rare, strange moments that jump out from the banalities of day-to-day life. For both, writing has to do with figuring out problems: it is a way of understanding oneself in relation to the world.

Put far more simply: writing helps us think.

In fact, it might be said, not at all unreasonably, that writing and thinking are mirror processes, and that they are two of our most trying intellectual tasks. But however closely linked writing and thinking appear, they differ considerably in form. 

While I was writing the second chapter of my dissertation, for a good six months I struggled to write a certain paragraph. There was research and synthesis to be done, compacting a broad field of study into a series of pithy and legible declarations. I did it, but it took a good deal of time and not a small amount of my sanity. As I revised the chapter, though, it turned out that this long-labored-over paragraph would in fact be a footnote, a mere way-station en route to a different, more important argument.

I was upset. I called my advisor: “Six months! Six! For a footnote!” He replied calmly, almost cheerful: “yeah, man, talking about ideas is fun, but thinking is hard.”

It’s true, thinking is hard. And it turns out writing may even be harder. Language is a Rube Goldberg machine: it fails us, breaking down over even the most simple idea. The written word is ill-fit to experience, and everyone since the Greeks knows this.

But this is also why writing is useful. Writing, I want to propose, is an experience of our intellectual limits. To struggle with writing is to struggle with thought itself. To be able to write something down to satisfaction — clearly and with confidence — is no mean feat. It signals that that thought has become legible, well-formed, crisp. It means that you have, if only for a moment, really understood something.

I suspect this is why the personal essay looms so large in college admissions: because the essay is an imprint of one’s agility as a thinker. And more than anything, intellectual agility is what makes a great college student. A written work— carefully tuned and expertly turned — is the expression of one’s most ambitious thinking self. 

Thinking is hard. That’s why we write.

— Bob Ryan

Join Bob for his online seminar Writing Yourself: The Personal Essay And Why It Matters in which he will introduce students to the fundamentals of writing a personal essay with an eye toward the college application.

Bob Ryan is a humanities tutor and college essay expert living in NY. He has recently joined Intelligentsia and we are thrilled to have him on board.