I’ll be the first — but certainly not the last — to admit that I am a yapper. I love to talk to and with others, whether these discussions are in or outside of the classroom. However, I think there is a point that one’s participation in class can overstep the boundaries of what is polite, contributive work and and turn into long-winded rants to prove one’s intellectual superiority — or simply adequacy.
In past years, I had little to no issue with tangential bouts of non-class material, but during my final semester here at Kenyon College, I’ve come to the realization that some students just talk to hear themselves talk. While there isn’t necessarily something wrong with trying to earn those participation points, I continue to find myself zoning out when students ramble on with buzzwords without actually providing substantive ideas to the class.
A couple weeks into this semester, I began to wonder whether the reason I wasn’t clocking these ‘intellectual grandstand-ers” was because I was, in fact, one of them — spewing my opinions on things that the rest of the class wouldn’t understand because the information I was basing my thoughts was not accessible to them through our required course materials.
In a bioethics seminar a few weeks ago, during a discussion of whether Aristotelian epistemology strongly influenced the Catholic Church, my mind wandered back to a discussion in a previous class about St. Thomas Aquinas’ adaptation of such ideas. I wished to discuss this with my professor and the class. Careful not to spit out words and ideas not provided in the reading materials for this course, I gave a brief synopsis of Aristotle’s concept of hylomorphism (the definition of which is, admittedly, not substantive to this piece). Though I was tacking a few sentences onto what I wished to discuss with the class, it was important for me to state this background information for us all to interact with the opinion I was presenting. All this is to say that I wanted to make sure that the concepts I was thinking of and discussing were made available to students who had not sat through Tuesday and Thursday sessions of Professor Rebecca Lloyd Waller’s “Faith and Reason: Medieval Philosophy” during fall semester — and I didn’t expect them to have done that in the first place.
I believe that intellectual grandstanding is a habit for more outspoken students, or those who have grown up feeling as though they constantly have to prove themselves to be a scholar. However, they will be respected as an undergraduate student all the same in the classroom. We gravitate towards lecturing because we want to be heard, and we want to put our brains to use; this is not inherently bad.
When what we are saying becomes difficult to track, or feels as though it borders on preaching, that is when we need to take a look at ourselves and evaluate how we are coming across to others. We want to connect with our professors. We want to share intelligent conversations with our professors. These discussions are tampered with when we use the space and time provided for classroom interaction to speak single-mindedly of our own interests without informing others of where our research or fascinations come from.
I can confidently say that in each and every one of my courses at Kenyon, at least one person in each in any given week intellectually grandstands — and I think that it has gotten worse as the semester goes on. To be frank, I don’t appreciate it and I believe I appreciate it less because I know that I was once deep in the throes of it too.
I do believe that this grandstanding can be stopped, or at least, quelled slightly, by increasing our self-awareness of our yapping, as well as taking an active interest in the ideas of others. I realize that this sounds like something that each of us are doing on a daily basis, but I don’t believe that we are doing both of these things to the degree that they need to be done.
I know that I want to engage more closely with my peers, inside and outside of the classroom, and fostering two-way communication is essential. We can do this better; by doing it better, we are ensuring that others don’t automatically zone out when we open our mouths, that they will pay attention to what we say because we aren’t approaching the discussion with a fervent need to spout inaccessible or not-currently-accessible information in the classroom.
Removing the ego is not easily done, but it is imperative to our success as students and as community members at Kenyon and beyond.
