Thoughts on time spent in classrooms 
Thursday, February 25th, 2010
Finals week approaches yet again. My life as a born again college student has been about what I would have expected when I was 17 and looking forward to going on to higher education the first time.
Classes are stuffed full of people who would probably prefer to be anywhere else, the homework often feels like torture, and the lectures seem endless.
I often wonder if my students feel the same about the classes I teach at the local job centers?
So far my least favorite essay was on Machiavelli’s “The Prince”, although Voltaire’s “Candide” wasn’t that much better. Oddly, “The Prince” was also my favorite essay. Somewhere along the way, banging out 7 pages of glorified book analysis became a bit fascinating, and it was at that point in the writing process where I stopped loathing the assignment and became excited to make the next point. I’d gone from feeling like the task had no purpose, to having an opinion about it, an opinion I was eager to put to paper. With “Candide” that moment came later when I was using it as a source document for an essay on the cultural changes that made the French Revolution possible. When I applied the novel to it’s historical context and began to imagine what sort of impact such a saticial work might have, the story clicked into place. Gone was the image of an unwieldy and unlikely farce, and in it’s place was a cleverly arranged work designed to pull down all the curtains and prod the reader into asking questions.
So maybe the key to learning for me is to find the context in which the little pieces take on fuller meaning.