A tale of two classes

The sound of my phone vibrating on the wooden desk beside my bed combined with the monotonous ringing of “Radar”—the default iPhone 5 alarm sound—forced me out of bed. I leapt toward the sound and stopped the alarm, hoping that my roommate didn’t wake up at this ungodly hour because of my academic masochism. The time was 6 a.m.; after collecting four hours of sleep, I was awake again and ready to take on the day.

The night before—after taking a three-hour break to watch Tom Brady cement his status as the greatest quarterback of all time, much to my chagrin—I had spent close to five hours reading articles and books on the topic of civil-military relations for a class. Despite having devoted the near entirety of my Sunday to preparing for Monday’s class, I still had more work to do. With my roommate sound asleep and the sleep deprivation washed away by a lukewarm Craven shower, I opened my copy of the assigned book and began taking notes.

With ten minutes to spare, I threw on a suit and tie and rushed over to Gross Hall for my 8:30 a.m. seminar. This class—my first of three for the day—featured retired four-star General Martin Dempsey as a guest speaker. Today’s class was the first in which Dempsey would be present. I wanted to make a good first impression and was confused about the dress code when a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is in attendance, but I hoped that the general would not notice the collection of stains that decorated my suit jacket from the various themed rush parties the week prior. All credit goes to Burnett’s and Heavenly Buffaloes’ blue cheese dressing for turning my blazer into a regular Jackson Pollock canvas.

Luckily, neither my professor nor Dempsey noticed and, with 300 pages of fresh reading churning in my head, I was “prepared” for class. The next two-and-a-half hours were spent engaging in critical discussion of the readings, which every member of my 15-person lecture had so diligently done, led by a conservative instructor.

Immediately after, I hustled to my 11:45 a.m. class, a lecture taught by an outspokenly liberal professor. In this class, in which latecomers were forced to sit on the floor due to a lack of seats, I could count on one hand the number of students who actually completed the entire weekly reading. The next 50 minutes were spent listening to the professor provide an informative and entertaining oration on economic mobility with jokes intermittent at the expense of certain students in the lecture, myself included.

In my third and final class of the day—a computer science lecture—I spent the 75 minutes of instruction reflecting on my morning. I wondered why my first class of the day could not even manage to fill its 18-person enrollment, while the second class had eclipsed its 100-person enrollment cap. I came to the obvious conclusion that the prospect of “work” had dissuaded students.

The first class focused on a specific topic with which most students are unfamiliar and required 200 pages of reading per week, whereas the second class was generally based in American history and the average Duke student could get by relying on education acquired in high school. One class made students push their limits, while the other provided the option to stay in their comfort zones.

Certainly, students could have pushed their limits in the second class, but that would have required unnecessary and inefficient effort. As a result, more students opted to maintain previously held beliefs rather than expose themselves to new ones due to a factor of convenience.