<p>I see your final point… my anecdote does not prove that Northwestern students are not able to talk about intellectual things outside of class.</p>
<p>(clarification: a professor brought up Ethan Frome, and none of the students knew the book/ felt comfortable enough to help her out. I don’t discredit the Northwestern students’ intelligence because they didn’t know this book, that’s why I categorized it under “random trivia.” I know the post came off as if I was so ****ed off that NU students didn’t know this book and I imagined that all Chicagoans did).</p>
<p>What DID bother me, though, was that it was somehow UNACCEPTABLE for me to have brought the title up. In other words, the classroom atmosphere was extremely strained, and students only said certain things when they thought it appropriate of them, and there was no real interplay, no real throwing around of ideas. I agree that students shouldn’t knowingly subvert the conversation, but at the same time, making free connections (Marx’s theories remind me of a Twix bar…) can be helpful for students and can, if nothing else, be incredibly amusing. That’s why we still have the uncommon app: we don’t care about “something important that happened to you,” we care about how you connect ideas.</p>
<p>Maybe I should clarify my overall point, and I agree, it will never be solid enough for a courtroom. When I was in high school, things like this happened all the time to me. I’d bring up something about the book we were reading, and I’d relate it to another event, or I’d talk about how I scribbled out the outline to my 10-page research paper on a MetroCard, and people in the class would turn around and stare at me. I was having a good time in class; they were not amused. These were (in a large part) the same people who looked at the Uncommon App and wanted to cry/scream/ask why Chicago had to be so weird.</p>
<p>At Northwestern, I felt like it was high school all over again. I happen to think NU is a great place and I even thought, after this classroom experience, that the students were quite smart, but I didn’t like that there were things that were appropriate to say in class and things that would make everybody stare at you.</p>
<p>At Chicago, there’s really nothing you can say that will make people stare at you, either inside or outside a classroom. I needed a place where I could make my crazy analogies and I could tell stories and connections that I had to help me make a point and then take it further. I remember a student on the c/o 2011 uncommon app thread started a conversation by saying “I love Ann Coulter” and a bunch of students, who were hardcore liberals, started unpacking that statement. Who is Ann Coulter really, what is her job, and what does she mean to society?</p>