A Likely Story | Just for the sake of learning

Is it possible to want to learn solely for the sake and love of learning? No, I’m not talking about a once-upon-a-time scenario inhabited by elves and butterflies. I’m talking about a real thing at Penn.

Preceptorials are short, non-credit seminars organized by students with the purpose of giving their peers a space where they can be taught by remarkable professors without having to fret about what’s going to be on the final. This gives preceptorial participants an occasion to really engage and ask questions — not as a way to boost their participation grade but as a way to learn about subjects frequently unrelated to their majors.

Preceptorials are “a wonderful opportunity for students to interact with and learn from the faculty beyond the confines of the classroom,” wrote Julia Wong, chairwoman of the Preceptorial Committee, in an e-mail. “Each preceptorial brings together a diverse group of students from different academic backgrounds eager to share and learn from each other’s perspectives.”

I couldn’t agree more. As Wong said, whether the preceptorials are geared toward discussing political theory in Macbeth or visiting Fallingwater — the famous house designed by superstar architect Frank Lloyd Wright — they offer students a unique opportunity to explore ideas and places that wouldn’t be covered by their syllabi.

Just last Friday — thanks to the efforts of the Preceptorial Committee — I got to sit in a cozy room in the Penn Women’s Center and spend a couple of hours writing, watching and reading creative nonfiction monologues. I was psyched — not only because my high expectations of awesomeness were more than adequately fulfilled — but because I saw people willing to tell their stories and eager to listen to others tell theirs. All of this resulted in a noteworthy lack of the awkward silence that occasionally invades recitations and seminars across campus.

The reason, then, why students so eagerly embrace preceptorials is because they represent what is best in Penn students. These seminars are built on the belief in students’ willingness to learn.

College sophomore and Preceptorial Committee member Alicia DeMaio participated in a seminar on Dante’s Inferno that she enjoyed so much that she is now taking a course on The Divine Comedy. She said she especially appreciates that students take preceptorials “just for the sake of learning — not for a grade, not to add to your resume — just to gain the knowledge.”

The popularity of preceptorials — reflected in the need to generate a waitlist for almost all of them and their justifiably strict attendance policy — is a testament to the sincere desire to sit down and be taught that would ideally be the motivation behind every decision to enroll in a class. This, of course, is a bit impossible. At the end of the day, we all have requirements to fulfill and prerequisites to take that we aren’t necessarily crazy about.

But there is also something else — a big something else.

Recent news that a disproportionate number of undergraduates at Columbia University earned a 4.0 grade point average last semester put grade inflation on the table again. As a result, there is also the strong suggestion that students too often value what letter a class will leave them with over the actual knowledge that they might acquire.

In light of this, deciding to learn from singularly knowledgeable professors in non-graded preceptorials stands in sharp contrast with the lamentable inclination to trade beneficial academic challenges for an easy A.

Penn ranks among the best institutions of higher learning in the world, but this university is also what you make of it. Purposefully taking a class that you know you will ace only to get closer to your 4.0 dreams ironically makes that statistic a hollow one.

Preceptorials are here to remind us all — shall we ever forget — that we are here, first and foremost, to learn.

Sara Brenes-Akerman is a College junior from San José, Costa Rica. Her e-mail address is brenesakerman@theDP.com. A Likely Story appears every Wednesday.

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