<p>Last year I took an advanced Ancient Greek course. There were a half-dozen students. We studied together for every test. Sometimes we met at 11 PM, because that was the only time everyone could make it, and kept going until we were falling asleep. (Usually someone brought tea and cookies :)) After exams we’d share our translations and go over the spots where we’d gotten stuck. No one ever asked, “So, how did you do?” – they asked, “Did you figure out the irregular aorist in the sight-reading passage?”, or “How did you translate that weird genitive absolute?”</p>
<p>That same semester I also took organic chem – big class, lots of students from outside the chem program (neuro majors, bio majors, premeds from other departments) who didn’t know each other. It could have easily been an anonymous lecture: show up and leave without talking to the other students, cram by yourself, desperately trying to stay on top of the grade curve. Instead, the same thing happened: people split into groups, studied together, asked questions that went far beyond what we needed to know – because they actually cared about more than the test.</p>
<p>This is what I mean when I say that we don’t compete, and that we care about learning for learning’s sake. People are committed to their classes, but they recognize that skating through with the best grade for the least effort is not the ultimate goal; they would rather make sure that they actually understand – and help the other students in the course understand. And their interest doesn’t stop after they get their grade: they want to figure out the things they got wrong, and keep a fresh understanding of the material so they can connect it to their other classes.</p>
<p>I haven’t met anyone here that I’d describe as “complacent” about academics-- maybe that says something about the crowd I hang out with, but I also suspect a complacent student wouldn’t last long in most departments…</p>