Interesting info on Earlham

likes2draw
Thu, 29 Sep 2005 17:37:27 +0000

Having received some wonderful advice from parents here last spring, I thought I some initial observations on Earlham, now that son and family are six weeks into first semester.

First of all, I wasn’t there for orientation but my son and his dad’s take on the speech was BORING! But it’s been largely uphill from there.

Like Obesmom, I found son’s advisor open and engaged. Since I was not going to meet him at orientation, I emailed him a week before and we had an amazing phone conv. He’d already read son’s file and had worked up an initial suggested course list. And Earlham has an impressive policy: first years try out their classes for three days before finalizing registration.

A few negative campus culture observations: 1) Don’t be fooled by the ‘dry campus.’ There is as much drinking here as anywhere. Perhaps things are settling down now, but for the first few weeks S found the party/drinking scene pervasive and pretty unpleasant. If you look in the Live Journal entries, I think you will get a sense of this. 2) The school has a fairly rigid policy on living in the dorms for four years and staying on the mealplan. Most rooms are traditional doubles; it’s hard to get a single. The food is almost universally disliked and lots of cooking goes on. The catch is, of course, that if your kid hates the food and gets in the habit of cooking or buying food outside, you are still incurring the expense of the mealplan. All of this is done to encourage the wonderful Earlham sense of community, but the policies can be limiting too.

Academics: So far very positive, if considerably even more PC than expected. (It is not easy to find ANY dead white men in the catalog! :-] ) The first year courses really stress the development of college reading, analysis and writing skills. For example, every paper so far has been assigned twice: once as a draft and then back for a rewrite. Teachers are VERY accessible. S has weekly meetings with his advisor (by choice) and has spent hours outside of class going over assignments with several profs. One teacher, seeing S struggle with a learning disability in memory that impacted his performance on a series of quizzes, tore up all the quizzes and offered him this alternative to demonstrate his command of the material: he gets to write a short paper in his room on his computer the night before each quiz. He called me the other day, in tears of joy, exclaiming that here is a teacher who “gets” how he thinks and that… Earlham really may be the school for him. Wow.

So, there you have it, some negatives and some positives. Overall, seems like a good choice was made last April. Looking forward to Family Weekend next weekend.