Busy Busy

So it’s been a week.

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I honestly don’t remember how this week started. I know I went to class on Monday and then some other event in the afternoon, but I only know that because it’s written in my planner next to the other 50 scribbled in activities for the week. I feel like I’ve been at college for a month, and I feel like I’ve crammed a semesters worth of academic knowledge into my puny brain in the span of four days.

To be fair, they warned us beforehand.

At every opportunity they get, they make it a point to remind us that “Minerva is academically rigorous,” and I remember reading that months ago, before I even applied, and I specifically remember thinking to myself:

Yeah that’s good. I’m sure it’s not that bad, but yeah I need that challenge. I’ve been sitting on my ass not trying hard enough for too long now. Hopefully that’ll do the trick.

Sigh. I hate my past self.

I have never studied this much in my entire life- I never had the need to. At Minerva, you’re not graded on your homework, but your classwork, and similarly, the rigor, is mirrored too. Traditionally, classwork is hard, and then you go home and review the content in your homework and everything is all nice and dandy.

That’s not Minerva.

At Minerva, homework is hard, and class is harder. And when I say homework, I mean reading- like a lot of reading. You read about 4-5 articles, depending on the class, and then you complete some guided reading questions, and then you complete the pre-classwork, also depending on the class, and then if you have time/really hate yourself, you can do the additional optional readings.

wHy.

You attend class Monday through Thursday from 9:00AM to 12:30PM, with a 30 minute break in the middle. And then you get done and I swear on the first couple of days I started doing my homework around 3:00PM after lunch and decompressing, and I DID NOT GET DONE TILL 10:00PM AFTER STRAIGHT WORKING AND READING AND CRYING ALL THAT TIME.

As the week progressed I definitely got better, though.

I started taking less notes, and paying less attention to the details that the professors did not specifically point out, and simply stopped trying to read EVERYTHING and understand EVERYTHING in depth, because it’s just not possible in the amount of time that they give us. Part of me doesn’t like that. Part of me thinks that it is just too much really interesting information and too much analysis in too short of a time and it doesn’t give enough time to my brain to just absorb and digest the information.

But...

Another part of me feels really accomplished. I feel like I learned a lot, didn’t waste much time, and most of all, I feel like I learned things that mattered.

How Minerva works is that the students go through the initial data transfer of academic information on their own before class (this means readings and practice problems and such), and then during “class,” we all jump onto this online platform to complete polls and reflections and, most significantly, discussions about the raw information that we absorbed the night before.

While this is quite effective in learning how to, not only understand, but apply the content that we learned, it is also mentally exhausting.

By the time we get out of class, all the students wander out of their rooms like zombies and murmur things like “wait what” or “I am more confused after class than I was before.” The fact that class is online, and it’s recorded, and the teachers have the capacity and necessity to go back over the recordings and scrutinize them to produce our grades, means that there is not one second in which you can be zoned out or not paying attention during class.

You take one second to think oh wow that was a nice breeze and then suddenly it’s “Amulya what would you say to that?” and then you have control your facial muscles and swallow the squeak in your throat and say something stupid like oh sorry my video cut out, do you mind repeating the question?

A midnight trek up Corona Heights

Oh boi.

And then there’s extra curricular.

There’s MiCo meetings, which are like clubs but are called Minerva Communities, and CoCurriculars which are community partner activities, and events around the city like yoga or museums or hiking trails or famous donut shops, and obviously pre-work on top of all this and of course there’s class in the morning and then in the middle you have to remind yourself that you’re human and feed yourself something somewhat nutritious and then somehow still find the time to have a social life and destress and just freaking breathe.

I’m sure all college students are busy, but when I visited my friends at UTD I swear they were out hanging out half the day instead of doing school related stuff.

But don’t get me wrong: I don’t hate it.

The whole thing is enriching. I’m learning about things like #openmindedness and logical equivalency and reductionism and all these cool interesting skills that I feel like teach me how to learn in stead of how to memorize- how to regurgitate information for some other person's validation. They’re teaching me how to be a good person and how to be an effective person- whether I like it or not. And honestly I think that is how school should be.

They keep saying “no matter what we do, we do it intentionally, so please trust the intentionality behind the activities and engage with them.”

And so far, there is nothing more true.

It’s spectacular how thought out and deliberate everything is, and their use of analogies to create not just analysis, but far transfer (haha new word I learned), is so foundationally built off of scientific research on learning that whether you consciously engage or not you’ll learn something- just by accident.

I think the most annoying example of this is their use of HCs or Habits of mind and foundational concepts. HCs are basically shorthands for larger learning concepts that are represented by hashtags. So when I said #openmindedness, even though I meant it ironically and as a joke, some part of my brain actually understood the logic and the concept behind it, and chose to apply it in this situation. A part of me thinks that they made HCs into hashtags intentionally just so that we would use them as memes but still practice them without fully being aware of it.

Either way, I'm just glad that I'm making progress.

I'm ready to learn.