College Tips - The Intellectual Problems of the College Freshman
In
entering upon a college course you are taking a step
that may completely revolutionize your life. You are
facing new situations vastly different from any you have
previously met. They are also of great variety, such as
finding a place to eat and sleep, regulating your own
finances, inaugurating a new social life, forming new
friendships, and developing in body and mind. The
problems connected with mental development will engage
your chief attention. You are now going to use your mind
more actively than ever before and should survey some of
the intellectual difficulties before plunging into the
fight.
Perhaps the first difficulty you will encounter is the
substitution of the lecture for the class recitation to
which you were accustomed in high school. This
substitution requires that you develop a new technic of
learning, for the mental processes involved in an oral
recitation are different from those used in listening to
a lecture.
The
lecture system implies that the lecturer has a fund of
knowledge about a certain field and has organized this
knowledge in a form that is not duplicated in the
literature of the subject. The manner of presentation,
then, is unique and is the only means of securing the
knowledge in just that form. As soon as the words have
left the mouth of the lecturer they cease to be
accessible to you. Such conditions require a unique
mental attitude and unique mental habits.
You
will be obliged, in the first place, to maintain
sustained attention over long periods of time. The
situation is not like that in reading, in which a
temporary lapse of attention may be remedied by turning
back and rereading. In listening to a lecture, you are
obliged to catch the words "on the fly." Accordingly you
must develop new habits of paying attention. You will
also need to develop a new technic for memorizing,
especially for memorizing things heard. As a partial aid
in this, and also for purposes of organizing material
received in lectures, you will need to develop ability
to take notes. This is a process with which you have
heretofore had little to do. It is a most important
phase of college life, however, and will repay earnest
study.
Another characteristic of college study is the vast
amount of reading required. Instead of using a single
text-book for each course, you may use several. They may
cover great historical periods and represent the ideas
of many men. In view of the amount of reading assigned,
you will also be obliged to learn to read faster.
No
longer will you have time to dawdle sleepily through the
pages of easy texts; you will have to cover perhaps
fifty or a hundred pages of knotty reading every day.
Accordingly you must learn to handle books expeditiously
and to comprehend quickly. In fact, economy must be your
watchword throughout. A German lesson in high school may
cover thirty or forty lines a day, requiring an hour's
preparation. A German assignment in college, however,
may cover four or five or a dozen pages, requiring hard
work for two or three hours.
You
should be warned also that college demands not only a
greater quantity but also a higher quality of work. When
you were a high school student the world expected only a
high school student's accomplishments of you. Now you
are a college student, however, and your intellectual
responsibilities have increased.
The
world regards you now as a person of considerable
scholastic attainment and expects more of you than
before. In academic terms this means that in order to
attain a grade of 95 in college you will have to work
much harder than you did for that grade in high school,
for here you have not only more difficult
subject-matter, but also keener competition for the
first place. In high school you may have been the
brightest student in your class. In college, however,
you encounter the brightest students from many schools.
If
your merits are going to stand out prominently,
therefore, you must work much harder. Your work from now
on must be of better quality.
Not
the least of the perplexities of your life as a college
student will arise from the fact that no daily schedule
is arranged for you. The only time definitely assigned
for your work is the fifteen hours a week, more or less,
spent in the class-room. The rest of your schedule must
be arranged by yourself. This is a real task and will
require care and thought if your work is to be done with
greatest economy of time and effort.
This
brief survey completes the catalogue of problems of
mental development that will vex you most in adjusting
your methods of study to college conditions. In order to
make this adjustment you will be obliged to form a
number of new habits. Indeed, as you become more and
more expert as a student, you will see that the whole
process resolves itself into one of habit-formation, for
while a college education has two phases--the
acquisition of facts and the formation of habits--it is
the latter which is the more important. Many of the
facts that you learn will be forgotten; many will be
outlawed by time; but the habits of study you form will
be permanent possessions.
They
will consist of such things as methods of grasping
facts, methods of reasoning about facts, and of
concentrating attention. In acquiring these habits you
must have some material upon which you may concentrate
your attention, and it will be supplied by the subjects
of the curriculum. You will be asked, for instance, to
write innumerable themes in courses in English
composition; not for the purpose of enriching the
world's literature, nor for the delectation of your
English instructor, but for the sake of helping you to
form habits of forceful expression. You will be asked to
enter the laboratory and perform numerous experiments,
not to discover hitherto unknown facts, but to obtain
practice in scientific procedure and to learn how to
seek knowledge by yourself.
The
curriculum and the faculty are the means, but you
yourself are the agent in the educational process. No
matter how good the curriculum or how renowned the
faculty, you cannot be educated without the most
vigorous efforts on your part. Banish the thought that
you are here to have knowledge "pumped into" you. To
acquire an education you must establish and maintain not
a passive attitude but an active attitude.
When
you go to the gymnasium to build up a good physique, the
physical director does not tell you to hold yourself
limp and passive while he pumps your arms and legs up
and down.
Rather
he urges you to put forth effort, to exert yourself
until you are tired. Only by so doing can you develop
physical power. This principle holds true of mental
development.
Learning is not a process of passive "soaking-in." It is
a matter of vigorous effort, and the harder you work the
more powerful you become. In securing a college
education you are your own master.
In the
development of physical prowess you are well aware of
the importance of doing everything in "good form." In
such sports as swimming and hurdling, speed and grace
depend primarily upon it. The same principle holds true
in the development of the mind. The most serviceable
mind is that which accomplishes results in the shortest
time and with least waste motion. Take every precaution,
therefore, to rid yourself of all superfluous and
impeding methods.
Strive
for the development of good form in study. Especially is
this necessary at the start.
Now is
the time when you are laying the foundations for your
mental achievements in college. Keep a sharp lookout,
then, at every point, to see that you build into the
foundation only those materials and that workmanship
which will support a masterly structure.
|
