To the Curriculum Committee, and in particular, the Fundamental Skills sub-committee,
I am writing this letter, the first in a series, in response to the solicitation of feedback by the committee.
I know that Lord Jeff, our quondam mascot, has hardly been buried, right next to The Moose, his would-be successor. So I hope it won’t appear too ugly to be rushing in with a modest proposal for a modest mascot. If not, I’d like to present to you for your earnest consideration, ladies and gentlemen, the Hamster. Now before you cast wild regretful eyes upon Lord Jeff with sighs of “What a falling off was there!” let us take a moment to consider the Hamster. It has a lot going for it.
— Hamsters are mammals. This is good. Most Amherst students and alumni are too.
Even when I lived in Illinois, I did not pay attention to neighboring Iowa. For all its virtues — corn, rolling plains, the rare Iowa Pleistocene Snail — my attentions were elsewhere. It had, perhaps, an “Iowa aura.”
But since the presidential campaigns for 2016 started last year with my best friend working as a paid organizer for Hillary Clinton’s team in Fairfield, Iowa — I have dared to look deeper at that Midwestern outlier.
Every time I sit in Frost Cafe, I see student after student go up to the counter and buy a plastic water bottle. They toss them in their backpacks and drink them throughout the day. When they’re done, they throw them in the recycling if it’s convenient or just toss them in the trashcan if it’s nearby.
This is me asking you, all of you who are still using plastic non-reusable water bottles, to stop.
When struggling with motion sickness, the best strategy is to sit completely still and look straight ahead. It has a grounding effect. Only after my first experience of driving through the snaking streets of San Francisco did I need to employ this tactic. My inaugural foray into the city marked the beginning of the innovation trek, which began in the home of Kelly Close ’90, founder of Close Concerns. As I sat unmoving in Kelly’s beautiful home, I ruminated on the absolute uncertainty of the future — I do this often.
Fear is not generally a part of Amherst students’ philosophy of education. We often hear that we’re supposed t o feel uncomfortable with our education — that’s how we know we’re learning.
We come to Amherst because we want push ourselves beyond our own self-created intellectual boundaries. Why, then, are Amherst students so afraid to challenge themselves in the classroom?
Grades are a subjective system that systematically values a narrow set of qualities that so very often do not correlate to greater life satisfaction or produce better students of the world. Tests chronically misdiagnose ineptitude in a subject, and professors’ personalities have the power to fundamentally alter both the way material is taught and how students’ work is examined. One of the greatest and most accepted myths in the academic realm is such: Grading properly measures a student’s achievement, understanding and hard work.
