This is my last column. Please hold your applause till the end. Over the course of the year, some of my friends asked me why I bothered to write a column for The Diamondback. I didn’t really have a good answer for them then and I’m not sure I have one now, but here’s an attempt at an explanation.
I assume most of The Diamondback’s readers are undergraduates. I know some graduate students, faculty and staff occasionally pick up the paper on their way to lunch or the bathroom, but it seems to me more than 28,000 undergrads are the target audience.
So what makes me think that I’ve got something interesting to say to a reading public comprised of people whose lives, priorities and attitudes are likely very different from my own?
Some of it comes down to ego. I like to talk and argue with people, and I’m usually pretty sure I’m right. It’s hard to say that without sounding like a total jerk, I know. But my certainty that I’ve got a point to make is part of who I am, and a venue like a column in a student newspaper was a tempting challenge.
Ultimately, I considered writing the column to be a kind of teaching.
There’s an important difference between teaching in a classroom and writing a column. In the classroom, the interaction between me and the students is a crucial part of what I consider the teaching and learning process to be. I work from a prepared lecture, but always incorporate student questions and reactions into what I’m doing. In my opinion, classroom teaching is a process of exchange between the teacher and the students.
On the other hand, this column was more of a one-way street. Occasionally people would e-mail me or post a comment online about a column I’d written, but my column was read (if at all) by people without their responses or reactions affecting my efforts to make a point.
For the most part I’ve written about educational issues because that’s what I’m interested in. My goal was to use a column on The Diamondback’s opinion page to introduce the reading audience of undergraduates to some of the current topics of concern in education in America today.
It seems plausible, if not necessarily likely, that at some point this year my column may have caused you to stop and consider the politics of education, if only for a moment.
Education is not static. The nature and functioning of educational institutions in the United States has changed before and will change again. The schools we have are the product of the choices we make.
As students, teachers, administrators and voting citizens, our action or inaction contributes to the educational culture in this country. You have the power to help determine what schools and schooling will be.
Jeremy Sullivan is a doctoral candidate studying American history. He can be reached at sullivandbk@gmail.com.
