I feel that this entry needs a little bit of introduction, and this is what I can offer. On one hand, I think these thoughts operate within the general framework/theme of this blog (since they essentially make up a journal entry), but I also think that it's acceptable for me to break up things from time-to-time with different types of entries. If you think this is foolhardy and/or a gigantic waste of time, feel free to let me know. Please enjoy and comment.
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After the first week of May I will have completed my second year of graduate study in English. I have met new professors, read many books and articles, and been more than impressed by the intelligence and abilities of many of my peers. Through all of this, there is one thing that I have learned, one thing that I consider a fact of my continued education.
There is no such thing as a graduate student.
Naturally, my own experience is limited. I have only studied in one specific department, situated in a specific field in a specific university. I don’t want to assume that my feelings on how graduate school works are somehow universally representative of how things work for everyone in a position similar to my own. I am keenly aware, however, of the reality that I am no longer a student. The reason I am no longer a graduate student is because, as I understand it, there is no such thing as a graduate student.
I recognized and admitted this fact when writing a letter to my younger sister last week. In her previous correspondence she expressed frustration with one of her own graduate courses, writing, “If I already knew all this shit about the XIX century I wouldn’t take this class.” But in my experience, that is precisely the reason why people take classes in graduate school.
I have been a student – in an educational, non-theoretical way – for twenty years. I have almost no memories of the period in my life when I was not a student. In many ways, this is all I know. But now this definitive element of my life has changed.
I think that my understanding of what it means to be a student is fairly uncontroversial. To me, being a student means engaging in the process of trying to learn new things, identifying your interests and being educated about things that were once unknown or foreign to you through a relationship with a teacher. Being a student is about creating a fuller scope of knowledge and understanding, learning about topics and themes and people that you didn’t know before.
Of course, being a student is also about being taught. But it is now clear to me that at some point the educational experience shifts from expanding into new fields to entrenching yourself in a specific field of study, whether it be an author, a time period, a theme, or a theoretical approach. If you want to study William Blake, you don’t enroll in courses on 20th century American literature to learn about a field outside of your specialty but instead to find trace of Blake’s poetry in the writings of Hemingway and Fitzgerald (even if, as I am often inclined to believe, such traces are not there at all).
My interior response to these ruminations is always the same: perhaps I just don’t know what graduate school is supposed to be about; perhaps I consistently miss the point of obtaining a degree that refers to me as a “master” of something. Maybe this is just a natural transition that others in graduate school are anxious to make, and therefore go through more smoothly. Maybe being a student is part of a process that naturally ends at a certain point, of which I was naïvely unaware.
Seeing the ease with which my peers (if I may call them that) take to this new role makes it clear to me that I have approached graduate school in entirely the wrong way. It seems as though my first priority must be to identify my primary interest and do whatever I can to use other courses of study as a means for further solidifying my academic position. If I want to study 20th century British poetry – which is but one of my many interests – everything I do should serve to inform how I understand the lines of Yeats and Hughes and Larkin.
Therefore, if I enroll in a class on the plays of Samuel Beckett (which I did), I shouldn’t write a paper on the plays themselves as I see them (which I did) but rather create theories about how Krapp’s Last Tape was influenced by WB Yeats. If I take a course on the American 1850’s, I should only really be concerned with assertions of a dialogue between Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and Eliot’s “Four Quartets.”
I find one inherent problem in this understanding of graduate study, and that is that it brings an end to the education process as I know it. At the risk of sounding childish, insecure, and ignorant, I am not convinced that it is beneficial or educational to approach topics in this way. More than that, I find it dishonest to show educational interest when your real goal is to reduce an entire field to a footnote in your own studies of an all-but-disconnected topic.
Moreover, I find it selfish to operate under the assumption that other fields of study are somehow incomplete without forcing these types of readings. In other words, even if I were by some hilarious miracle to become the world’s preeminent Ted Hughes scholar, I don’t know that I would ever feel that it was my scholarly duty to show how my reading of Crow can affect (and make adequate) a reading of Moby-Dick.
What it comes down to is that graduate school is about teaching yourself instead of being taught. Despite what my sister feels, it is about taking classes on subjects you already know instead of topics foreign to your experience. I suspect that this is precisely how one can become worthy of the title of “master.” Graduate study is more akin to a laser beam than a shotgun blast.
Perhaps I am just unhappy because graduate school has not been what I expected. There was never any indication in my undergraduate education that things would be this way, so maybe this is my version of shell-shock. Maybe it has just taken me this long to realize that graduate school is about realizing your potential as an autodidact: first you much teach yourself so that you can teach others. I can find some resolve in that.
But now there are new questions I must ask myself. How long have I not been a student? How long have I been trying to be one when it was impossible to do so? What exactly am I if I am not a student? How important are these labels in the end? And most importantly: what do I really learn or understand from this process?
Begrudgingly, I learn that I am no longer a student. So it goes.
I think I can agree with your assessment. It's tough to mourn the loss of an identity and way of life. Sorry, brother.
ReplyDeleteBut, none of that means you have to stop loving education. Rather, I suspect it means your role in education is changing. As we go further in academia, we become our own guide (the process probably started in college, after all) and our own instructor.
How do we mourn for the loss of something we never truly appreciated? For the loss of a way of life that was never truly ours in the first place.
Naturally my assumption is that most other graduate students don't feel this way, so I would love to know what my peers think about this. Of course, that would mean that they would have to read my blog, and that's something I don't want to assume.
ReplyDeleteThe things I write about have been tough thing for me to realize, but I think I have accepted these changes. It is precisely because I love education that I feel what could be called a sense of loss in my current situation. No one ever grabbed me by the shoulders and told me that it was no longer up to my professors to teach me things. It would have shocked me quite a bit, but I kind of wish that had happened.
As always, I appreciate your comments, sir. You can take solace in the fact that you've helped me learn a lot, so if nothing else I have you as a teacher.
I would like to say that I experienced almost the same thing in my one year of grad school. I do, however have a slightly different perspective. I honestly don't feel that the teachers are 'teaching' us how to teach ourselves. I think that professors at these levels really enjoy teaching graduate students because they can get by with much less preparation and motivation time than with undergrad students. Every teacher gets guidelines and curriculum requirements for Undergrad, but for graduate studies they kind of recieve a blank slate. There is almost little to no oversight. For example, at the end of our two years we have to pass oral exams. Preparation for these exams are not found in any class or course. It is in effect independent study.
ReplyDeleteSince I studied to be a teacher, and really love teaching and learning how to be a better teacher, I of course always respected and admired my professors. But in my opinion, 'most' professors teaching at the graduate level see their graduate courses as lazy time. Or time, where they are allowed to ramble about whatever they want to. Most of the time is spent in their own research, etc... the teaching actually stays on the back burner. This full time job is what gives them the stable financial foundation to research, perform, publish, etc... A real desire to motivate, inspire, and develop a student is more likely found in highschool than at the graduate level.
I have to say I was also schocked and saddened at the situation. I had been so inspired by teachers before, I think I kept expected it would just keeping getting better and better as the experience of the teachers grew.
I of course don't want to say that every single graduate professor is this way, but in situation I'm pretty convinced. ha! Of course, early on I had to accept the situation and be glad that I was self-motivated enough in my field, to learn without somebody telling me to. And maybe that was what I really learned somewhere along the way, and that's the whole point of school? Who knows....
I agree with what you say in a lot of ways, Jessica. None of my graduate school professors have taught me how to teach myself. I have teachers who have spent extra time with me and worked with me on papers and shared sources with me, but I’ve had to learn research techniques myself. I am disappointed at the lack of mentorship that goes on here because I feel like I’m supposed to do everything on my own with little to no support structure backing me up and guiding me. I would like to think that the emphasis would be on training graduate students to be good researchers and teachers, but outside of specific classes on pedagogy that doesn’t seem to be a primary concern.
ReplyDeleteIn their defense, I think that teaching graduate school is a much different animal that leading undergraduate courses. I don’t think that excuses the lack of oversight you mention, but it can help to explain it a little. As much as they may have been trained in teaching undergraduates, most professors probably were not trained in the teaching of graduates. They do, in effect, have to do less “teaching” for graduate courses, but in my experience the teachers I’ve had don’t really seem lazy. That said, it might explain why I feel like I’m not really being taught (or, essentially, why I don’t feel like a student).
Part of my expectation is that I would work really closely with a professor, but I’ve found that that can be a hard relationship to forge. Professors today are expected to do massive amounts of research and writing on their own, so the relationship with graduate students tends to take a backseat in my opinion. That said, this is just my experience, so maybe my peers are finding things to be much more supportive, educational, and interactive than I am.