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"The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things."--Plato (427-347 BC)

Letter from Harvard Dean to students says "Slow Down"

Harry R. Lewis University Hall, Harvard College

Gordon McKay Professor Cambridge, MA 02138

of Computer Science E-mail: lewis@harvard.edu

Dean of Harvard College Phone: (617) 495-1555

FAX: (617) 496-8268

SLOW DOWN

Getting More out of Harvard by Doing Less

Dear Harvard student,

Students arriving at Harvard have gained admission by participating and excelling in a variety

of academic and nonacademic activities in their secondary schools. We hope that you will

continue to cultivate many of the qualities that distinguished you in your precollege years

— your pursuit of excellence, your strength of character, and your ability to balance your

academic drive with participation and success in extracurricular activities.

And yet college is different from high school in important ways, and some habits acquired in

anticipation of applying to college may not serve you as well while you are here. You may

succeed more fully at the things that will be most important to you if you enter Harvard with

an open mind about the possibilities available to you, but gradually spend more of your time

on fewer things you discover you truly love. You may balance your life better if you participate

in some activities purely for fun, rather than to achieve a leadership role that you hope might

be a distinctive credential for postgraduate employment. The human relationships you form

in unstructured time with your roommates and friends may have a stronger influence on your

later life than the content of some of the courses you are taking.

This letter offers some suggestions about how to get the most out of Harvard. Each suggestion

requires making choices, which may be hard choices, between doing more things and leaving

some possibilities aside. In a larger sense, these suggestions are meant to start you towards

a fulfilling life after college, perhaps many years after you leave here. In high school one’s

academic choices are limited, and most Harvard students have taken the most demanding

choice available where there was any choice at all. Many high schools have counseled students

that a longer list of activities, with as many leadership roles as possible, would impress college

admissions committees more than a shorter list with fewer titles. Yet in later life most of what

we do outside our jobs we do because we want to do it, not because we are in any tangible

way rewarded for doing it. College is a transition period; we will certainly give you grades

and transcripts attesting to some of the things you have done here, but much of what you

do, including many of the most important and rewarding and formative things you do, will be

recorded on no piece of paper you take with you, but only as imprints on your mind and soul.

It may seem hypocritical for us at the same time, perhaps, to offer you Advanced Standing

and to advise you not to accept it; or to explain how to qualify for a joint concentration and

to discourage you from pursuing one; or to offer other opportunities and to suggest that you

should not take them. But the most important thing you need to master is the capacity to make

choices that are appropriate to you, recognizing that flexibility in your schedule, unstructured

time in your day, and evenings spent with your friends rather than your books are all, in a

Page 2 January 9, 2004

larger sense, essential for your education. In advising you to think about slowing down and

limiting your structured activities, I do not mean to discourage you from high achievement,

indeed from the pursuit of extraordinary excellence, in your chosen path. But you are more

likely to sustain the intense effort needed to accomplish first-rate work in one area if you allow

yourself some leisure time, some recreation, some time for solitude, rather than packing your

schedule with so many activities that you have no time to think about why you are doing what

you are doing.

Here, then, are some ideas to consider. Talk about them with the people who know you

best, and whom you trust; consult your freshman or concentration adviser about them. Then

consult yourself. Remember that you — not those giving you advice — will be most affected

by your decisions.

• Don’t try to get every detail of your academic program nailed down ahead of time. You

do, of course, want to do some advance planning, to browse the Courses of Instruction and

the Fields of Concentration, to read the important parts of the Handbook for Students so you

understand that you have to pass 32 half-courses to graduate, etc. But you don’t need to

know as a freshman which four courses you will take during the spring of your junior year.

You won’t even need to know exactly what those four courses will be when that term begins,

since you will be able to make adjustments easily according to how interesting they look to

you as you visit classes during the opening week of the term.

We ask you to fill out a “Plan of Study” at the time you select a concentration, so by that

time you will need to demonstrate that you understand the rules of your concentration well

enough to have designed one way of satisfying its requirements, and also one way of satisfying

associated Core requirements. The Plan of Study is signed by you and by a representative

of the concentration, certifying that if you get credit for the courses listed on the form, the

concentration will recommend you for a degree. But you don’t have to take precisely those

courses, and in practice almost no student winds up as a graduating senior having taken exactly

the courses listed on his or her Plan of Study filed as a freshman. Interests shift, new courses

appear, existing courses are removed from the catalog or get new instructors, etc. Courses

change, and you will change as well; it is wise to recognize from the beginning that you will

want to be able to respond to your own shifting interests as well as changes made to the course

catalog. The study card you file at the beginning of each term can vary from the Plan of

Study, though it remains your responsibility to ensure that the courses you actually take will

satisfy your graduation requirements, just as your original Plan of Study would have done.

• Think very carefully before deciding to graduate in three years under the Advanced Standing

program. More than half of our entering freshmen are eligible for advanced standing on the

basis of their Advanced Placement test scores. Almost all these students ultimately choose to

stay at Harvard for the full four years: only about 30 graduate in three years, and another 25

complete undergraduate requirements in three years but remain in residence in the Houses to

complete Masters’ degrees their fourth year.

The reason why most eligible students don’t leave Harvard in three years is that they like

it here and don’t want to leave any sooner than they must. Purely in academic terms, each

student has the opportunity to sample only a few pages of our massive course catalog even

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in four years; the chance to take more courses, whether to branch out or to go deeper into a

particular subject, is all but irreplaceable once one graduates from college.

Advanced standing is particularly problematic for students with multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary

interests. If you’re not sure whether you want to study history or physics, a three

year program may require you to make that decision before you have been exposed to these

subjects at the college level. If you want to integrate two fields of knowledge, such as psychology

and computer science, you need time to take courses in both fields and time also for their

intellectual synthesis to mature in your mind.

Planning to graduate early may seem to be a no-risk proposition, but maintaining that option

may limit your course choices every term. Especially during the freshman year, which should

be a time of experimentation and exploration, the premature commitment to a concentration

required if you plan to graduate in three years may distort your academic program. It can

seem that a burden has been relieved if you simply relax and assume you will graduate in four

years instead of three, and pace your coursework accordingly.

The one irrefutable fact about graduating in three years is that it saves money. Yet we hope

that with recent adjustments in Harvard’s financial aid program, the incentives to leave in

three years purely for financial reasons have been minimized. There is certainly no reason to

think that a life path that may be open to you at the age of 21, say, after three years in college,

will be lost if you instead get a year’s more education and graduate at 22. Professional schools,

including both business and medical schools, increasingly favor mature applicants who have

more on their record than an abbreviated and intense undergraduate education.

If you do choose to graduate in three years, you should consider the possibility of taking a year

off before going on to graduate or professional school. At that point you will have been on a

pretty fast academic track for most of your life; a year invested in work or travel before you

resume your studies may pay dividends forever.

• Don’t think you’re doing something strange or wrong if you take a term or a year off from

Harvard before you graduate. If your motivation is flagging, or your grades are not what

you think they should be, or you’re just not interested in what you’re studying, take some

time off to refresh yourself and get your focus back. Harvard has a very liberal attitude about

voluntary time off; readmission, and even a guaranteed room in your House, are automatic if

you file the paperwork on time. Students who are struggling almost always do better after

some time off.

• Studying or working abroad can give you a new perspective both on your Harvard life and

on the world. Going abroad to work or study is a wonderful opportunity for students who

are doing well and are enjoying themselves here but have interests that they wish to explore

outside the gates of this academic community. You can learn much from foreign study, from

an internship, from field work, or from working in a professional office. After a year of review

and reflection, the Harvard Faculty has approved new study abroad rules from which you may

benefit; we urge you to look to a term or a year of foreign study as an option that may benefit

you intellectually and broaden your horizons in nonacademic ways. Study or work abroad can

provide a new perspective that brings into sharper focus what you are studying at Harvard.

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• Planning your time away will make it more productive. Deciding to take time away from

Harvard may well engage you in a serious and difficult discussion with your family, who may,

with every good intention, regard a decision to take time off as an admission of some kind

of failure, or may simply have trouble hearing that the career path on which you arrived at

Harvard now holds less interest for you than it used to. The Office of Career Services can help

you make a constructive plan for your time away, and freshman and concentration advisers,

Senior Tutors, Assistant Deans of Freshmen, and counselors at the Bureau of Study Counsel

can help you think through your decision and how to explain it to others. Parents may even

worry that if you leave, you will never come back. All evidence is against that worry; Harvard’s

six-year graduation rate is more than 97 per cent, one of the highest in the country, and the

roughly 50 students per class year who don’t graduate within six years of matriculation include

a few who transfer to other universities, some who take more than six years to graduate due

to health problems or family obligations, and a Bill Gates or two, but not many who simply

disappoint and never amount to anything.

• Be cautious about doing a joint concentration. Many students who are interested in more

than one thing want to study them both while at Harvard, and there is no reason not to do

that. Many science students have deep interests in music, for example. Often a student’s

first instinct is to sign up for a “double major,” a concept that does not even exist in our

curriculum. A joint concentration is meant to be a program that integrates two fields and

aims towards a research thesis bridging the areas. In other words, a joint concentration in X

and Y is meant for people who have an interest in the intersection of X and Y, not just in

both X and Y independently.

If you are interested in studying two subjects, the sensible course is often to pick one as the

field of concentration and to take selected courses in the other. You will be able to seek

advice from faculty in the second field about what program of courses to pursue, unburdened

by that department’s rules for concentrators. Joint concentrations almost always have many

rigid requirements, and once those are agreed upon by you and both departments, any change

requires coordination of all three parties. It’s rarely worth the trouble — certainly not for the

negligible benefit of getting both departmental names on your diploma.

There are exceptions to this broad advice. Students from certain foreign countries may find it

advantageous to have the name of some scientific or technical field on their diplomas. Some departments

have courses that are open only to concentrators, providing an unintended incentive

to sign up for a concentration even if you don’t expect to graduate in it. And certain fields,

such as Women’s Studies, are often combined with other fields to create joint concentrations.

• Don’t assume that a special concentration is the way to accommodate your multiple interests.

Students often think of turning to Special Concentrations when they cannot decide among

three or more strong academic interests. Rather than spending energy on the intentionally

difficult process of designing an individual concentration, take courses and seek advice that

will help you decide which interest best suits you. As with joint concentrations, your real

intellectual objectives may be achievable without a plan of study that bears a particular

name. Special concentrations best serve students engaged in emerging fields that have some

intellectual coherence but don’t fit in existing academic departments.

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• Don’t be afraid to change concentrations, or to switch to a non-honors program. Students

are sometimes inhibited from switching fields because they have “only” a few courses to go in

the field they now dislike, or because with a late start they can’t achieve everything that other

students will have achieved in the new field. Balanced against the disadvantages of flagging

motivation to study the old field and the opportunity for intellectual joy in the new field, such

inhibitions against the change may be unwise.

On the other hand, should you discover late in your Harvard career that you do not want to

finish the concentration program in which you are enrolled, you may have the option to finish a

basic (“non-honors”) program in that field. Honors tracks are designed to prepare students to

do advanced work in a particular field and to engage independent research, but after studying

a field somewhat intensively for a time, some students find that their intellectual development

has drawn them in other directions. In that case the flexibility of a more limited concentration

program and the opportunity to take courses, and perhaps even do independent work, in other

fields may outweigh the advantages of pursuing advanced work in the concentration field.

• Don’t choose a concentration for reasons of professional preparation. It’s a mistake to

think that there is an optimal course of study leading to a particular postgraduate career.

Many students have concentrated in Economics thinking it would prepare them for life in the

business world, or in Biology thinking it is the route to medical school. These perceptions

are inaccurate and can keep you from getting the full benefit of a liberal arts education. You

gain more from being intellectually engaged with a subject you love than you could acquire

in professional training. Professional schools by no means look with disfavor on students who

have concentrated in History or in the humanities. The Office for Career Services is an excellent

source of advice on what these graduate schools do expect in the way of academic preparation.

• Make choices that leave you more choice, more flexibility. This is a more generalized

version of the previous pieces of advice; it may be the most important advice of all. Think of

your freedom of choice — of what courses to take, of how to spend your Sunday afternoons,

whatever — as a commodity that is precious in and of itself. Don’t construct a schedule for

yourself that wastes that freedom. Learn to do constructive things with your time not because

you have to (under the schedule and the ground rules you have constructed for yourself) but

because you want to. For most of the rest of your life you will be reading a book or playing an

instrument or going to a lecture in the evening simply because it is interesting and fun. Get

yourself in that frame of mind sooner, and you will be a happier and more interesting person

later. Empty time is not a vacuum to be filled: it is the thing that enables the other things on

your mind to be creatively rearranged, like the empty square in the 4 × 4 puzzle which makes

it possible to move the other 15 pieces around.

• Leave something for after you graduate. If you decide late in your years here that you

want to go to medical school, don’t feel you have to cram the pre-med courses into your senior

year when you should be getting the most out of your thesis. Slow down — plan to register at

Harvard or elsewhere to take those courses when you can give them due attention. Likewise,

if you’ve been a Music concentrator and you fall in love with archaeology because of a Core

course you take your junior year, don’t feel you have to switch concentrations — take another

course or two, and consider taking more after you graduate, at night, in summer school, or, if

you want to pursue it seriously, as a special student after graduation or as a graduate student.

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• Look inside yourself for the question you are really asking. Students often present deep

questions in a superficial or instrumental form about how they can do several things simultaneously.

A student who asks, “How can I do a joint concentration in Music and English?” probably

wants to know something more profound, such as “How can I keep my interests in literature

and in music alive simultaneously?” If you are asking how to do something complicated, ask

yourself why you want to do it, and try to achieve your major objectives without necessarily

constructing a nexus which, in theory, would allow you to achieve everything and to give up

nothing. You may wind up dissatisfied with everything instead, your freedom lost rather than

enhanced.

Don’t be afraid to raise with your adviser a question of substance, for example about the

importance or wisdom of some intellectual inclination you may have, rather than questions

that address only rules and how to satisfy them. Questions don’t need to have clear and crisp

answers to be worth asking.

• Don’t try to do two major extracurricular activities simultaneously. Taking this advice

requires classifying extracurricular commitments into “major,” of which you should probably

have at most one, and “minor,” which might involve a meeting a week, a few hours of volunteering,

or some recreational athletic participation that does more to relieve than to create

stress. But if you’re starting on the varsity lacrosse team, you probably shouldn’t accept the

lead in the House musical the same term. If you are the go-to person for a weekly publication,

you probably shouldn’t also be the manager of a conference that will be bringing five hundred

students to campus. There are exceptions to this rule too — some people are exceptionally

good managers. But before you take on too many simultaneous major extracurricular commitments,

you should at least pause to ask yourself if you are trying to prove to someone, either

yourself or another, that you are superman or superwoman, and maybe even setting yourself

up for failure in that endeavor. Or if, perhaps, you are trying to avoid studying a subject that

no longer interests you.

• Join a student group and work to change it, rather than starting a new one. The imagination

and innovations of our students are a constant source of amazement. New publications,

new service groups, and new musical and theatrical groups spring into existence every year,

stimulated by the energies of individual students with special interests. So many of our students

are natural leaders that it should not be surprising that they often wish to establish

niches of special interest to them not filled by existing groups.

Some of the growth in the numbers of student organizations has come from the increasing

diversity of the College on many dimensions. Where once there was a single Asian American

Association, there are now also groups centered on subpopulations of the Asian continent, and

on religious or artistic cultures unique to Asian peoples. There are now nine a cappella groups,

each with a distinctive repertoire.

Yet sometimes organizations come into existence simply because groups of students cannot

agree on a common agenda. For example, there used to be two Republican clubs, which merged

when the leadership recognized that there was strength in unity. Groups born out of protest

against the intransigence of established associations rarely survive their founders’ graduation.

It is not hard to start a new student group at Harvard, but it is hard to launch one that gains

the organizational and financial stability it needs to survive. It can be a frustrating experience

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to start something and see it fail, or to feel that one’s personal energy is all that keeps it going.

The skills involved in working with others towards common (even if not identical) goals can

be as important in later life as a talent for entrepreneurial innovation.

• Don’t ignore your health, physical and emotional. It is characteristic of students to confuse

enormous energy and the capacity for extraordinary efforts with something more like immortality.

Your mind and body will break down if you don’t relax, exercise, eat well, and most of

all, sleep. Give yourself a break — take a few hours just to go to an athletic event, a movie,

a theatrical production on campus, a rock concert downtown. Sit outside and read a novel,

go to a place of worship, find a pleasant place off-campus where you can be alone with your

thoughts. Hang out with your friends, play frisbee, keep up the dining hall conversation till

everyone else has left. It won’t hurt, and will probably only help, your academic performance.

By the same token, get away from Cambridge over vacations, and don’t come back early. Your

academic work will be better and more productive if you are not burned out from having done

it continuously for too many months.

• Don’t expect yourself to be perfect. You’ve already accomplished a lot just to arrive here,

but life is complicated and every failure offers constructive lessons about yourself. Find subjects

you are happy studying, and things you are happy doing, even if you are not going to be the

best in the world at them. Do the things that matter most to you as well as you can possibly

do them, but don’t be hard on yourself if your best at many things is not as good as someone

else’s best. Viewed from the distance of their 25th reunions, most Harvard graduates remember

their friends, a few of their teachers, and their coaches, artistic directors, and other mentors

better than they remember what they learned in most of their courses. Enjoy your experience

here, and the many people who are here along with you, and your Harvard education will

sustain you for life.

• Finally, don’t treat my advice — or anyone else’s — as rules you must follow! What

matters is that you come to understand what you want; the challenge is to give yourself enough

breathing room to discover your own loves and how to pursue them, your own ambitions and

how to achieve them.

It’s your life, even at Harvard. Enjoy it.

Harry R. Lewis

Dean of Harvard College

The "Not Yets"

It's easy to become discouraged in the world of motherhood.  It's further compounded when your children's educational needs are being met solely through your efforts.  You can't blame anyone else when your hypothetical 11-year-old doesn't remember where to put the information when addressing an envelope, or when said child squabbles with her brother and whines all the way home from a 4-hour trip to Macinac Island.  While I might scold my children when they haven't learned something yet, in my heart I am embarrassed at my own lack of prowess as a mother and teacher, wondering where I've gone wrong.

But do I ever take credit when they do brilliant stuff? Because they do.

Nope.

Why? Because they are doing the work, not me: they're competing with friends in an online language course;  these not-morning-people are setting their alarms and starting earlier than any previous year; they have completed writing assignments that are charming and fun to read, with absolutely no whining; they are getting 89% of their work done with little input from me at all, including morning devotions; they're getting more chores done than ever, greatly freeing me up to get projects done for my shows; they also, of their own volition, chose to go running/biking with me this morning, one of them keeping up with me for a almost whole mile at an 8 min. pace before turning around. Further, there is very little nagging to get these things done in a day, compared to previous years.  This is all their doing, not mine.  You can only bring a horse to water, but you can't make him drink, so they say.

I can't and don't take credit for their hard work, so why do I pile on the guilt for their shortcomings?
If I were on the outside looking in, I might suggest to myself that I have enough shortcomings of my own without taking on theirs, too :-)

They are growing up and are learning from consequences.  They are adding subjects which interest them.  They are trying new things, even hard things, out of curiosity or for the sheer challenge.  They--like me--are in the process of becoming. Why not focus on successes and blessings-along-the-way instead of getting discouraged by the "not yets?"  After all, "not yet" means we have a ton of potential!

We Don't Need No Education

"I want for them the freedom to develop at whatever pace is etched into their DNA, not the pace dictated by an institution looking to meet the benchmarks that will in part determine its funding. I want them to be free to love learning for its own sake, the way that all children love learning for its own sake when it is not forced on them or attached to reward. I want them to remain free of social pressures to look, act, or think any way but that which feels most natural to them."
--Ben Hewitt, Outside Magazine, September 2014

Full article:
https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3866029126956886830#editor/target=post;postID=8859129218500282867

Fall 2014 Curriculum

Devotions:

 Devotion books and/or YouVersion for youth

Scripture Typer

History

             10 Christians Everyone Should Know

This day in history

Read good interesting history books/series: Wicked Histories, etc.

English:

Read tons

Spelling City

Journalism: Snapfish yearbook, blogspot entries

Writing Fridays: science and history excerpts

French: Duolingo

Geography:

Jetpunk world maps quizzes

Quizlet flashcards/teaching

Host a geography bee?

Math:

                Life of Fred

                Bills/checkbook/budget, as needed

                Small business management

Science

                The New Answers Book 1

                Night sky studies—Calvin observatory?

Environmental studies?

                Cooking from recipes

                Horticulture: pruning, garden design, propagation methods, installation

                Electricity: lamp wiring and design

                Experiment books

                Social science books like Quiet, Driven, etc.

Art

                Art Prize

                Canvasses

                Host a class?

Jeopardy!

                Nightly for 13 year olds, Fridays for 11 year olds J