Consciously Honors

So what is Collo and why is it here? We can start with what it currently does or attempts to do and work backwards from there. It serves as a kind of orientation for freshmen and transfer students. It encourages you to prepare for your future both as a student and after graduation. It encourages you to be engaged with the wider intellectual community. It encourages you to foster a sense of community within the Honors College. It encourages you to serve the community in some way. (And it gives us a time every semester that we know all of you are available.)

I don't think those are terrible things for a course to (attempt to) accomplish, but it's a pretty long list and such a list encourages thinking about the course as a series of boxes you must check every semester. Grading all your checked boxes also encourages me to think of it this way, and I don't like the idea of the course being a bunch of boxes to check. So we need to consolidate the list and put it under some larger umbrella that makes better sense of it all.

Some aspects of the course are unlikely to change--the orientation-type stuff, e.g., but those things comprise only a small part of the course. The rest of your time is largely filled with all the other things and it's those things that we need to make sense of. So here's a first stab at a unifying theme--be a more interesting person. Be curious, ask questions, try new things, learn new things, develop new skills, experience new things, etc.

I think that's what education should do. There is a lot you can learn outside of class. There is a lot you can learn from your classmates. There is a lot you can learn from others on campus. There is a lot you can learn by serving the community. In short, there are a lot opportunities to do new things, learn new things and develop new skills. The current syllabus attempts to capture some of this, but it only captures a fraction of the things you could be doing to meet this goal. Ultimately I would like to widen the scope of the requirements and use this course as a nudge towards doing those things.

As I've said from day one, this class gives you credit for doing things you should be doing anyway. I think you should be curious, inquisitive and motivated to make yourself a more interesting person and I think, at bottom, that's what an honors education is about. That's still really broad, but it gets close to what I think the course can and should do. It should encourage and motivate you to take advantage of all the opportunities you have to engage, experiment, interact and learn. To put things even more concisely, maybe we can think of Collo as an attempt to make you consciously Honors. That is, it's an attempt to get you to think about what you're doing, what you could be doing, why you're doing it and how it relates to your education, broadly construed.

So that's a start to answering the Stockdale questions. Maybe it's kooky talk, but for now it's spring and I'm pretending the tomatoes I plant aren't going to once again be decimated by blight.