Hitting the Wall

My junior year of college, I had the amazing opportunity to study abroad in Budapest, Hungary. As a math major, there wasn't any particular reason for me to do math in another country, except that back in the 1980s a group of Hungarian math professors started a program that brought math students from North American to Budapest to spend a semester studying math and exploring Europe. The program has the straightforward name Budapest Semesters in Mathematics, and it's still going strong today.

Back in 1996, I joined 40-odd other US and Canadian students in Budapest to take a lot of math courses. And I mean a lot. Instead of my usual liberal arts selection of college courses, I took four math courses and one Hungarian language course that fall semester. I had never piled up that many courses from my major at one time, and it wasn't easy! In fact, that was my most challenging semester of school to that point in my life.

One of the courses was particularly challenging. It was called Conjecture and Proof, and instead of covering a specific topic in the world of mathematics, it focused on creative ways to solve math problems. Very hard math problems, as far as I was concerned. Previously, if there was a hard problem on one of my math homework sets, I could fairly reliably solve it in half an hour or less. But those problems in C&P? I might work on one of them for four or five hours and still not have a solution!

Academics always came easy to me, but I hit the wall back in the fall of 1996. I had finally found a part of my education that was way harder than what I was prepared for. I had plenty of friends who had hit the wall in math much earlier. In fact, I've met more than one person who told me they started learning about adding fractions with different denominators in fourth grade and that's when they were done with mathematics! But I find that most everyone hits a wall like this, if they pursue an academic subject long enough.

On my old podcast, I interviewed Jenae Cohn, who is now the executive director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of California at Berkeley. She hit her wall in graduate school when she was faced with more readings for her courses than she knew how to handle. She was an English major in college--she was good at reading! But the sheer volume of books she needed to read in graduate school was not something she was prepared for. She needed new strategies for reading to handle that new challenge.

I shared Jenae's story with Mary-Ann Winkelmes recently when I interviewed Mary-Ann for my new podcast. Mary-Ann is the director of a project called TILT Higher Ed: Transparency in Learning and Teaching, and she shed some light on what Jenae encountered in graduate school and what I encountered in Budapest:

"Students come out of high school with a kind of set of strategies for learning and for succeeding in school. Even the most successful students will hit a kind of a roadblock once they become more specialized in different disciplines, because the kind of strategies that you learn for high school success work equally across all disciplines. When you get to college, each discipline has its own set of methods and terms and techniques, and the same strategies don't work anymore."

Jenae and I were both capable students, but when we hit our walls, we had to persist long enough to develop new, more specialized learning strategies for the subjects we were studying. I don't know what that looked like for Jenae, but I was able to persist and succeed only because my roommate (another American student) and I invited over all our classmates to work on homework sets together. Had I been working alone, I probably would have given up, thinking that I didn't have what it takes to succeed in upper level math courses. But having my peers around me, also struggling with those fiendish proof problems? That helped me see that it wasn't me that was insufficient, it was the work itself that was crazy hard. And somewhere in those late night homework sessions, we also helped each other find new, creative ways to approach those crazy hard problems.

I had to persist, and I had to adapt.

I share all this so that you will know that if you're hitting a wall in your studies, that doesn't have to be the end of things. Jenae Cohn hit a wall and then went on to get a PhD in English. I hit a wall and got a PhD in mathematics. Both of us have careers in higher education today, in spite of how hard it got for us. And if you're hitting a wall, maybe even in your first year of college, you, too, can overcome it. You'll need to persist, and you'll need to adapt.

As I discussed in last week's newsletter, one of the best ways to adapt is to brave your instructor's office hours and ask for help. As Mary-Ann said, "When you get to college, each discipline has its own set of methods and terms and techniques." If you don't know what those are yet, that's entirely appropriate! You're the student, after all. Talk to your instructor about how you'll need to go about learning in their class that might be different from other classes.

In her interview, Mary-Ann mentioned the example of an art history professor asking their students to analyze a painting and a chemistry prof asking their students to analyze a chemical reaction. They're using the same word--analyze--but in completely different and discipline-specific ways. It's okay to ask what they mean when they say that.

I've been asked by dozens of students to write letters of recommendation for them. The easiest and most powerful letters to write are the ones for students who came to office hours and asked questions. When a student knows they haven't figured something out yet and they go seek out the help they need to do so, that says a lot good things about their potential success in any job in the future. The students who never came to my office hours? I can't say much about them, unfortunately.

Next week in Intentional Learning, we'll shift gears and talk about learning during class time. How should students spend that time most effectively? When should they just skip class entirely? See you then.