Annie Thrasher
Honors LSEM 51
October 30, 2014
“Here I Stand”
Throughout these interviews I felt like I had far more in common with my fellow students. From everything from how terrible d-hall food is to how much we love our beautiful school, most Longwood students would agree with each other anyway. Many of the faculty and staff members also share our love of the campus. I didn’t find that I disagreed with much other than my reasoning for coming to college. Notably, I did disagree with Dr. Isaac in that I cannot see myself teaching anything but high school.
I love the sense of community at Longwood. Courtney expressed in her interview a fear she had that she would come in as a freshman and be picked on for it, and told the wrong places to go, because that’s what happened in high school. To her surprise, something I also found shocking, upperclassmen are more than willing to tell you where to go, who the best professors are, and where to get the best food in Farmville. It is so great to live in a place where I can run upstairs and as a sophomore or junior whose English 150 class I should take, because they are always willing to lend a helping hand. I’ve learned that this is especially true in the Honors College, when I was having trouble in a class and had tons of offers for a Cookout milkshake and a rant session from numerous upperclassmen girls willing to help out with my transition at school.
As a freshman, I came into classes with no idea of what to expect. Some of my peers, like Casey, didn’t really understand the hype of how much harder college classes were going to be compared to high school. She still has a 4.0, and has been going strong in all her classes since day one. My opinion leans far more in the direction of Hannah’s, a non-honors student, who was wholly unprepared for college classes. The style and rigor was something we weren’t expecting at all. I took 5 AP classes over the course of my high school career, and while they were extremely difficult, I still don’t think they prepared me as well as Casey seems to have been. In respect to classes still, when I asked my peers what their most engaging class was, it was unanimously a major class. I took the same route, in that my most engaging class is my Ancient Western Civilizations class. Dr. Isaac is genuinely interested in our opinions and is extremely interested in our interpretation of readings, which is highly encouraging to struggling freshman who are unsure of how to act in these college courses.
My solid disagreements came when I asked them why they had come to college. The consensus was that coming to school meant getting a better job to make more money. In one instance, an interviewee’s mother told her she would be disowned if she didn’t go to school. I came to college because I have a deep-set passion for teaching. I want to change the way students feel about going to class, and especially inspire students who don’t have much. We all have something special about us that we can use to change the world, as trite as that may sound, and I believe it is the teacher’s job to draw that out of students, which is exactly what I plan to do. We all came to Longwood for the same reason though. Even though it is tucked in a town nobody has ever heard of, Farmville is a gorgeous town. The ‘private feeling of a public institution’ is something everyone I’ve spoken to has cited as a reason for coming here. This is also the reason Ms. Bates and Ms. Prouty came here to work at Longwood.
In talking to Dr. Isaac, I found that, strangely, he and I disagreed on something about education. He feels that teaching high school is difficult, which I do not disagree with, but he also thinks it is more difficult to interest a high schooler in a history class they don’t care about than it is a college student. I disagree, because a college student is usually just taking the class for a general education requirement. They can get away with barely showing up and barely passing. In high school, you are not only required to take the class, but you are mandated by law to go to the class. I find that once you put the material into a context that students will find engaging and relevant, you can encourage them to branch out and find even more things they enjoy about the subject. I think this is an important skill to for an educator to have anyway, and being able to relate things to people in a way that interested them in what you have to say is a convenient skill to have in any major.
Everyone at Longwood is fantastically unique and talented. We all bring something to this university that wasn’t here before, because if we hadn’t we wouldn’t be here. I think that I bring important qualities that don’t go to waste, and that are shared by many of my peers. Curiosity, for instance, is incredibly helpful when you are learning about civilizations that haven’t existed for thousands of years. Having a passion for what you do is also something I find extremely important. It is useless to become a teacher if you are not in love with what you are doing. To me, there is nothing sadder than a teacher who couldn’t care less about their students’ education. Overall, I understand and agree with most every reason students and staff had for being at Longwood University. It is a wonderful place that is so full of wildly different and interesting people that makes life here so much more interesting, and I love this school all the more for it.
In the Fall of 2014 I took my Longwood Seminar Class. It was my first honors class, and this is one of the 3 papers I wrote for the class.