Senior English major

When I was in middle school, I came across the first instance in which I learned it might not be super cool to get really good grades — so I tanked my report card. I had a steady stream of “Cs” and “Ds” for a while. By high school, I was still convinced that school wasn’t important, and not caring about my marks was the price of being cool. I graduated cool (with an even cooler community college future).

Now that I’m at a real college, I understand the importance of a good education — or at least the yearn for the appearance of one. So, with the return of thousands of clear-eyed, full-hearted students to our little slice of this town we call College Park, I thought I’d address the very nature of why we’re all here: education. Or perhaps, at its essence, knowledge.

Knowledge is essentially the result and process through which we learn and the way we apply it. Simple enough. Yet if you observe the way we share or prove our “knowledge,” you’ll notice we’re not exactly expressing what we know in the best possible way. That doesn’t seem very knowledgeable.

For one thing, most of us cheat. We never purely absorb knowledge to begin with, but instead pretend that we do while knowing we don’t. And those of us who don’t cheat are so proud and, at the same time, insecure of how much people think we know that what we actually know is rendered almost worthless. Basically, it comes down to average students faking what they know or knowing what they say they know is fake.

I call this phenomenon “associative knowledge,” or perhaps more interestingly, “iPhone-Siri knowledge.” It basically equates to the smallest amount you can know about a subject that elicits either an “A” or a positive reaction from a friend.

In regard to the Siri reference, this problem is apparent in the average members of our generation. It results in not much more than the ability to have a computer screen instantly tell you the answer to whatever question you could have.

However, Siri’s answer is always “too right” — it is never improvised, appreciated or expanded the way a person’s might be. In other words, the knowledge or intelligence is never an applicable skill.

Every one of us wants to be Siri. We want to be asked questions that only we can answer. We are so smitten by the inclusion and potential praise that we embellish in the falsely earned attention that comes with being right, and we embrace it rather than buck it.

Really, we should appreciate knowledge for what it is: just a step ahead of us. Knowledge is the struggle of formal education and life experience that results in the confidence you know what you’re talking about. It comes from an acceptance of differences. It should not be a Siri approach — learning as much as you can to impress other people or give the token random fact of the day. At the end of the day, what you know should never come down to what you can say you know.

So for this semester, I’d say study the struggle of your education, not just the end. Grade yourself on what extra things you learn while you try to learn something else. And if you get the chance, tell Siri to shut up and let you think for yourself for once. Maybe then you’d learn something.

Drew Farrell is a senior English major. He can be reached at farrell@umdbk.com.