Tag: life

Table For One

My dorm’s laundry room has twenty-something washers and dryers, out of which at least half are running at any given time. It’s a busy place, each machine clamoring as inhabitants of the building scour the rows for an empty unit to throw their load into. The lint traps in the dryers are a dark, ashy gray: the result of years of being cleaned a lot less often than they are used. Lone socks and forgotten underwear make a pile near the sink, above which a couple of “Good Laundry Practice” posters are taped to the wall. And over it all, the chemically sweet smell of detergent hangs heavy in the room.

In the middle of this chaos, however, I find solace.

What was left out from the overwhelmingly extroverted narrative of college life (all those times I was told that college was where I was going to find my best friends for life, my soulmate, and make unforgettable memories) was just how much time I was going to spend alone. Just by myself.

“But that’s not the ideal college experience, right?” is a question I asked myself far too often after I moved into my dorm two months ago, and the answer to that is that it probably isn’t. But the truth is that the day-to-day reality of my social life is much less exciting than the condensed versions of the experience I have heard from others. While I do spend a lot of time going out with friends and even just studying in the library with them, there’s an equal, if not more, amount of time I spend alone, regardless of voluntarily or because of my schedule. This solitary side of new-found independence is something I shy away from; when walking to class, I feel the urge to check my phone incessantly, just to look busy; when grabbing a quick lunch at the dining hall, to pull out my laptop and glaze over emails and to-do’s mindlessly, just because I am terrified of being viewed as a loner.

In places like my dorm’s laundry room, I find solace to be alone: not looking at my phone, not working, and of course, not with anyone. The timed washing and drying cycles ensure the coming and going of laundry-doers, but never the staying for long enough to notice me linger just an extra minute in the steady hum of the machines.

Will I ever be comfortable being alone in public anywhere else? Maybe on the bus and maybe when I wait for the walk sign to turn on before I cross the street; I just don’t know. But in the meanwhile I hope I internalize that it’s OK to be alone. It always has been.

Untitled #5

I could watch cats groom each other all day long.
Sandpaper tongues,
Small, pink,
Appearing fast
And disappearing faster.
With utmost care and precision,
From tiny toe beans to full, warm bellies,
Licked clean.

And then suddenly,
Friendly rivalry;
They go for the throat.
A nip of fur,
A quick paw,
And just as suddenly,
Back to grooming.

Licked clean,
And then, sleep.

“Is this graded?”

Reading the syllabus for each of your classes is one of those first day of school items that you do and then forget for the rest of the year. This year, however, the syllabus, and more specifically the new grading system, had everyone talking.

My school recently made a quiet but impactful change in how students were assessed- homework would no longer count towards our final grades, and if it did, it would be only a small fraction of them. Our grades would depend in majority on quizzes, tests, and final exams. This new, apparently more equitable way to assess students bought about many opinions. So far, after two weeks of in-person school and talking to many different people, I’ve heard both extremes of those opinions and also found some similar to my own. I don’t know what to expect, and I don’t know if it’s going to benefit me. But I do trust my school and teachers to take the right decisions, and even if they don’t mean something to me directly, they might to others and I respect that.

I wanted to analyze my own thoughts about the grading system. How can schools get a proper understanding of what a student knows? Every child is unique and growing during these crucial years of school, and everyone learns in different ways. Personally, I think that my school’s new plan is a step in the right direction because it allows students to learn however they want and only show it to their teachers on tests. Another, bigger reason for my support is that tests assess students on one crucial feature: accuracy. While completion-based grading is an incentive to do whatever is assigned, accuracy-based grading adds an aspect of reality (“real life” as we’ve been told so often) to school and the learning experience. In the actual world, if you do something wrong there are consequences. Tests represent that in a much lighter way- if you do something wrong, you only get a bad grade.

Some people that I’ve talked to do think that tests put extra pressure on students due to their time constraint, grading, and the individual student’s desire (and sometimes necessity) to do well, and I agree with that. Without homework, a cushion for most students’ final grades, academics are going to be harder. And although homework is essentially optional now, many teachers still do assign it and expect it to be done.

Could smart grading soon follow smart whiteboards into classrooms? Hopefully.

Banana Appreciation + Inspiration

“Don’t compare apples to oranges!” people tell me, but deep down inside I’m actually just comparing apples to bananas.

Fruits can be categorized in many ways, one of them being like this: the ones that taste different every time you eat them, and the others that are bananas. We’ve all eaten sour apples and sweet apples, but have you ever eaten a banana that did not taste like every other banana that you’ve eaten? Bananas are special in the sense that they are the same no matter where you go. I think we can take that fact a bit further to make it something we can learn from.

In today’s world we are exposed to so many different ideas and opinions, and even the everyday news has food for our thoughts. We are changing, in our beliefs and own opinions, continuously. During this change, it’s important to have a sense of who you are so that you aren’t just changing but bettering yourself so that you are an asset to society with your uniqueness. I feel like bananas portray this perfectly. They change with time, showing through the brown-black spots on their yellow peels that they are taking the effort to change themselves to be better individuals. Their taste becomes sweeter and their texture becomes mushy, but does that change who they, as excellent sources of energy, are?

“We should be more like bananas” may sound questionable out of context, but with reference to the text above, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Be the change you want to see in the world, but be yourself too.