Author: Eric Kleinsasser
Registration for fall courses will be happening soon, and as I, along with the rest of my class, look forward to a second academic year at Occidental, I find myself reflecting on how this year has compared to my previous expectations.
It seems for the most part that Occidental has provided what I hoped for in college: a close-knit community of students and a positive, liberal atmosphere, complementing a challenging academic environment that offers variety and intellectual stimulation from a collection of insightful and personable professors. I have been profoundly impressed by the individual attention given to students, and I have both enjoyed and struggled with fascinating course material. Occidental has set a very high standard for itself.
For this reason, I feel the need to admit mild disappointment with one aspect of my college experience so far. I want to offer my thoughts on some shortcomings of the CORE program for first-year students, and I should probably offer them before the conclusion of my own first year. Specifically, I want to address the first-year seminars, and the various activities associated with them.
It all started out with the summer reading. My peers and I were assigned Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies to read back in August. Lahiri’s work integrated several themes related to race, religion, culture, individuality, romance, and other topics of pertinence to the aspiring twenty-first century college student. Although I found it somewhat melancholy, I enjoyed the book and was mentally preparing myself for some sort of college-level assessment of my reading comprehension abilities when I arrived at Oxy.
Instead, however, I was instructed to attend a mandatory lecture in Thorne Hall that, while offering some insight, did little more than summarize the topics of the book and occupy an hour and a half of my day. Dr. Neti, the presenter, did a fine job, but I felt that the lecture was geared more to inform and less to provoke. The same goes for our second mandatory reading lecture, given by Dr. Chakravorty, in early February.
At this point, I hope the reader is wondering what occurred during the 5-month interval between the two lectures. Well, we first-years attended classes, took midterms, wrote papers, took finals, went on winter break, and started up the Spring semester. There was no mention of Jhumpa Lahiri or her forlorn characters from the CORE faculty until late January.
We were then informed that, following the second mandatory reading lecture, we would be given a timed writing assessment to help the administration determine if we were proficient writers. How wonderful, I thought-an essay test on the book I read half a year ago.
I read Interpreter of Maladies again. So did many of my peers, presumably on the principle that when one writes a comprehensive essay, it is best to have some recent recollection of the subject matter. On February 20-177 days after we were supposed to have finished Lahiri’s book-we gathered in our respective Spring seminar classes and spent 55 minutes writing on themes from her work. This comprised what would be one-third of the determinant of our “writing proficiency.”
I suspect that the CORE office believes there is some logic behind having the assessment in February, but there are surely better ways to facilitate this test of students’ writing ability. Maybe we could have the assessment earlier? Or be told to read the book over winter break? At least a few of my peers could probably be convinced to submit their ideas to improve the current system. I was unable to locate the CORE Office’s comment box. Maybe the office would benefit from sending out a survey to the students. Not to worry, CORE Office; we’ve had plenty of practice responding to surveys.
Maybe such a survey could include a section for input on the first-year “Cultural Studies” seminars. I mention the seminars because a few matters have made me particularly curious. In particular, I have wondered: is it optimal to have science and history professors stepping in for what seem suspiciously like English classes? The professors have apparently had “CSP Training” of some sort, but the seminars I have taken seem predominantly concerned with other issues. Lessons on fundamentals of writing and analysis have been glossed over at best.
This is not to suggest that the classes have not been interesting; in fact, parts of them I have found fascinating. However, the focus of these seminars is not English, and from what I have heard from my peers, the CSP Professors tend to avoid the subject in exchange for their own specialized course material.
If this is not the intent of the CORE Program, I propose that the faculty either change the format of the program to accommodate their intentions, or abandon the notion that the CSP courses are somehow directly related to English.
Admittedly, we do write plenty of academic papers-at least for the seminars I took. However, writing papers and having them graded does not necessarily correlate with what students learn in a remedial English courses–courses that more accurately set the standard for being deemed a “proficient writer.” It just seems as though the whole system has a few inconsistencies that could be easily remedied.
There are other issues I have not mentioned, but to avoid rambling on all by myself, I assert again that the CORE Office would benefit from sending out a survey to the first-year students. Or perhaps letting us know where the first-years can find your comment box.
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