We students spend most of our time in class or working on assignments. We adorn our schedules with activities and rest and meals and exercise, as we look forward to the weekend and to the next long break. But our primary task is schoolwork, and our primary occupation is student. Do we enjoy this work?
A few weeks ago, I listened to a freshman tell me about a 2016 Notre Dame Magazine article — ”What’s Best for Them,” written by Kerry Temple ’74 — which he had to read for Moreau. Temple details the side effects of our celestial expectations and unending ambitions on our psyches. Eight years have passed, and now few are unfamiliar with the dismal statistics on students’ mental health and the experts’ warnings to take care of ourselves and take time to rest. In my experience, if the class does poorly on an exam, professors are more likely to console us that ‘we are worth more than our grades,’ than to rebuke us for our lackluster preparation. And I think many of us desire a healthy ‘work-life balance.’ (Whether we have one or not is another story.) We encourage each other, especially on weekends, to lay down the heavy burden of our backpacks and let loose a little. It is college, after all.
Through these encouragements, though, do we help carry each other’s crosses, or do we merely distract each other so that, when we return to our work, our crosses have only gotten heavier? We all know that feeling of dread on a Sunday morning following a care-free Saturday. It is really too bad that, for us students, Sundays often become days for plowing through grueling assignments. What has been intended as a day of leisure has become a day of toil. But the work must be done, and Lord knows how little time there is to do it.
On the day back from winter break, at the beginning of my first class, my professor asked us to go around and say what we were most looking forward to about the spring semester. A good three-fourths of us said, “spring break.” That cannot be healthy.
Many of us were probably antsy to move into college so that we could finally enjoy more freedom. But, now that we are here — at Notre Dame, a place we love — do we really feel free? By all objective metrics, excepting parietals and other du Lac policies, we could hardly be more free. We can do what we want, when we want, with whom we want. But do we feel in charge of our lives? More specifically, do we feel in charge of our work, of our studies?
I frequently do not. My professors assign; I turn in. They schedule exams; I study. And if I do not … well, the consequences are unthinkable. My hand is forced. The work must be done.
It is no mystery why we might not always enjoy our work or why we do not always feel free doing it: the work is difficult, and doing difficult things is difficult. To learn and to grow, we must struggle. But there is a healthy struggle, which we trust will bear fruit, and there is that desolate struggle, for which we cannot see the point or the end. It is the latter, rather than the former, which must be responsible for the mental health issues discussed by Temple, and for spring break being the highlight of the spring semester.
Surely, we have all felt that paradoxical joy that accompanies the former kind of struggle and that makes our work so fulfilling, but we also inevitably have to face the latter kind of struggle. We should not seek to avoid the struggles of being a student — though sometimes we really do need a weekend or a long break — but rather we should seek to find joy amidst our studies. There is nothing wrong with encouraging our friend who picks up his backpack on a Saturday night to have some fun instead, but I wonder if it would be better to ask him, “Hey what are you working on? Do you like that class? What are you learning about? Has it changed the way you see things at all?”
I sometimes think of the Mark Twain quote: “Do not let schooling interfere with your education.” I have always thought Twain must have had a bad experience in schools, but maybe that is not so. We can learn a great deal from our classes, but we can also let them keep us from learning what we really want to know. I find that sometimes an academic treatment of a subject spoils my interest in it, or that a structured class robs me of the joy of unguided, independent learning. Of course, required assignments and long readings and class discussions and expert professors have taught me much more than I could I have hoped to learn on my own — for that, I am grateful. But I am equally grateful for the books I’ve read and the ideas I’ve had and the things I’ve written on my own. I used to learn on my own time so that I could be a better student; now, I try to be a better student so that, when I graduate, I can learn anything I want.
Maybe I am not yet free to learn entirely on my own, but I trust that the classes I am forced to take, with all their required assignments and exams and papers, will train me to see the world not as my professor sees it, but as my own eyes see it — as the sovereign student of God’s creation.
