Freedom And The Unconditional “A” Posted on March 20th, 2012 by

I want to tell you about a time I was granted complete freedom. Thanks to Dr. Will Freiert, our Professor Emeritus of Classics on campus, I recently learned that the Liberal Arts are, at their roots, about freedom. The Latin root is liberalis, which means freedom, and Liberal Arts translates to freedom skills. I like to think of them as skills for a free mind, or even more simply, an education that teaches a person how to learn. I got to learn about this kind of freedom in my first year at Gustavus in a class with a curious name: Changing The World.

The opening words on our first day of class were simple: “Everyone gets an ‘A.’” I remember very distinctly a few moments of silent expectation—surely this sentence wasn’t finished. All of the students in the class had been through 12 or more years in structured grade-school education and we knew there had to be a “But…”

But it never came. We sat in our big circle exchanging surprised looks for a few more moments until our professor broke the silence. “At the end of our month together, I will walk over to the administration building with my grade sheet, and you will all receive an ‘A.’” And he meant it. He asked of us one thing: each week, we would write him a letter in order to share how we got our “A” that week.

To be honest, the class was less than easy. I am so thankful the class was in January term where I could fully immerse myself in the course; it consumed me much more deeply than I expected. The material we read was difficult: the Epic of Gilgamesh and works by Desmond Tutu. We learned about the tragedies of the Holocaust and damage caused by our own country throughout the world. But, the class went beyond the academic rigor of the material and found its way under my skin into where the hardest work awaits: answering questions about who I am, what I believe, and what I will do with my one, precious life.

An Unconditional “A”, as I fondly refer to it, gave me freedom to learn that I had never experienced before. Despite all of the advice for mentors and role models that the grades are not the most important thing, I had always felt the pressure to succeed in school, and my grades were the primary marker of my progress. When I received an “A” at the very beginning of this class, I began to see other ways to measure my success as a student, as a learner and as a person.

My letters to the professor seemed to reflect this transition. In the early weeks, I babbled about how well I accomplished the readings and contributed to the class discussion. And as the letters continued, they began to reflect a new appreciation for learning. I began to recognize a passion for engaging people in conversation, the value of listening to others, the appreciation for a hot cup of tea between my fingers and the crunch of snow under my shoes. It was here that I began to understand how very linked the readings and discussions are to my growth as a person.

Freedom inspires knowledge that, as Cardinal Newman writes, “is capable of being its own end.” The personal insight into my own life during my first January Term class was not something that needed to be qualified or credentialized into something measured in a grade book. Learning goes beyond that. The things I learned in Changing The World set the foundation for learning that will continue for the rest of my life, and to be honest, I’ve never had a class like it at Gustavus. Other classes have taught me an awful lot, and I have gotten a few “A”s since, but none of them have been as satisfying as the Unconditional “A” that taught me what it really means to learn.

 

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