When I was a kid, my dad liked to tell my brother and me stories about his college classes. He told us about professors who wrote with their right hand while simultaneously erasing with their left with students just expected to keep up. I remember thinking, "I'm a good student, but I'm not good enough for that." I was warned about professors who didn't care and classes with 300 people in them. I was told of oral exams with questions that couldn't be answered. The end result was fear. I wasn't sure I would be able to handle college.
Then, I went to college and found that, while there were a few oddball professors, they were a small minority. The vast majority of them were normal people who taught in normal ways. I had a class or two in a massive lecture hall, but I also had classes with only seven people in them. I had a few professors who couldn't have picked me out of a lineup, but I also had professors who knew me well and loved me and rooted for my success in their class, and they used their office hours to help their students do just that.
The first week after Christmas break is alumni week at GRACE. It's when we have the most visitors on campus (which was nice this year after not being able to have them last year). We have a reception for them at the first basketball game after we return, which is a fun time to catch up with their lives. And, in our chapel service this week, we had an alumni panel. They did a great job answering questions that had been submitted by our juniors and seniors, but they also repeated what many before have done. They told stories of professors who didn't care and talked about giant lecture classes where no one knows them. As we headed back down the stairs, some members of my sophomore community-building class said, "Well, now I'm scared to go to college." My plan for this week's community-building class is to balance things out a bit.
It's fun to tell stories about the weirdos; it's not a good story if you tell about a normal person behaving in expected ways. It's only a good story if it is unusual, but we should probably make sure we tell them that it is unusual. If every one of my dad's professors had written and erased at the same time, he wouldn't have survived it. I had a P-Chem professor who talked so quietly that we strained to hear him even though there were only seven of us in the class, and we were all on the front row. I like telling stories about him and trying to mimic the things he said at the volume he said them, but if I couldn't hear any of my professors, that would cease to be an amusing story and become a tale of how I wasn't educated.
Something can be true without being the whole story, a lesson a try to teach my 8th-grade students when I show them the website banddhmo.org, a site which tells a lot of scary things about a chemical called dihydrogen monoxide without ever mentioning that the chemical in question is water. It's important that we give our students a more complete picture of college. If we only talk about how great it is, they will be disillusioned when they have difficulty with a class or have a fight with someone in the dorm. If we only talk about the struggles, they will be afraid to apply to college at all.
So here's the whole story. Yes, you will have some professors who are only there to do research and don't want to teach at all. But, you will also have professors who deeply care about education and work hard to make their lessons what you need them to be. Yes, I had a chemistry professor who didn't know who I was when I bumped into him in the hall. I also had Dr. Halsmer, a thermodynamics professor, whose tiny office was so packed with students he was helping that one was sitting on top of the file cabinet. In the dorm, I had some of the stupidest fights I've ever had in my life, but I also bonded with people in a way that can't happen without sharing a bathroom during exam week. Those are the extremes, but most days are just normal days. You'll go to normal classes where you will learn in normal ways. You will have normal meals with normal friends and have normal conversations. You will have a mostly predictable life peppered with a few amazing moments and a couple of horrible ones. It's important that when we tell kids stories about college that they know we are only sharing the dream moments and the nightmare moments but that those are only the extremes.
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