How have YOU changed?

It was my first semester as a fresh-off-the-boat graduate student.  One of the classes was planning theory, with Martin Krieger as the instructor. Having shifted from engineering to a completely new field, in a new country, where the educational system was completely different, I never ever felt out of place like I did in that classroom.

A couple of weeks in, when we were discussing the  assigned readings, I had something to say.  But, as I started speaking, I started sweating out of sheer nervousness.  I bet the class looked at me with sympathy.

A couple more weeks later, we turned in the first of the papers in Krieger's class.  Again, never having written essays all through the four years of college, I had no idea how to write papers. When Krieger returned the evaluated papers back, I had earned a gentleman "C." 

"C." 

I felt crushed. 

Not that I was chasing the magical 4.0 GPA; I was, after all, the same old high school student who couldn't care about grades.  But, I now worried that I had erred in ditching electrical engineering and getting into intellectual areas that were far beyond my abilities.  In the engineering undergraduate program, I never had to write essays.  And now in graduate school I had to demonstrate my understanding through essays.

There was nobody to talk to about this.  Maybe I could have talked to professors, but I had yet to understand that one could go to a professor's office and talk to them about problems. 

But, the wonderful aspect of being an adult, as opposed to me in my teenage years, was this: I was able to work it out within me.  I quickly became a better writer.

A few years after graduate school, when I started writing opinion pieces in newspapers, I got appreciative remarks about my writing too.  Once, a stranger stopped me when I was out walking and introduced himself as an instructor at the local community college.  He said something that blew me out of this world: He often used my newspaper commentaries as examples of quality writing for students to analyze.  What more a compliment could I ask about my writing ability!

In my commentaries, and here in this blog too, I often personalize the social, political, and global issues.  I bring in my own life experiences.  I did that even in the academic book-reviews.  Autoethnography, this is called. But, nobody taught me to think this way; to me, there is no other way to understand the world.

When I read, when I travel, I reflect on how those influenced my life and my thinking about the human condition.  My argument gets refined and clearer.  Sometimes, I have had to ditch my view altogether.  Is there any other approach to thinking about the world?

Channeling an essay that I read a long time ago, I have often told students that they telling me about having read Plato or Bradbury doesn't mean much as them demonstrating how their thinking changed as a result of reading Plato or Bradbury or whoever.  What's the point in reading a lot if none of the ideas in those books ever made a dent on how we think.  And if there is no change in how we think, isn't that mere blind faith?

It is a similar thing about travel too.  When people talk about the countries that they have visited, I am so tempted to ask them how those travels changed them for the better.  But, I don't ask them.  We do not have a faculty-student relationship for me to ask such questions.  I merely listen to their travelogues and move on.

In my approach to autoethnographic writing, I relate the books that I read and the critical movies that I watch to my life.  Travel has been a wonderful learning experience.  I wish I could take Martin Krieger's planning theory class now.  I will have plenty of points to discuss in the classroom, and I will do that without sweating it out.  I am certain that I can write quality papers now.  But, wisdom arrives way too late in life, and youth is wasted on the damn young!