In the first semester of my freshman year, I found myself sitting in the second row of Professor Rebecca Lloyd Waller’s “Introduction to Ethics” class. Because I had never taken a philosophy course before, and I had narrowly squeezed into a variety of courses on topics I was relatively familiar with, I felt completely out of my element while working through our assigned reading on Locke.
This, admittedly, was a new feeling for me. In high school, I usually had an inkling of what I was going into — the general ideas we would cover in each class. While I knew that this introductory course explored the idea of what a person “ought” to do according to the minds of prominent philosophers, I felt like I couldn’t grasp the topics as easily as the student to my right, who raised his hand with ease. Meanwhile, I kept my right hand firmly on my pen and the other on my bouncing left leg.
Two weeks into the class, still sitting in the second row, I decided that something about my mindset had to shift. There was no way that I would feel confident in my abilities as a student and learner if I came into class dreading discussions about the philosophical texts. I genuinely wanted to give this course my all, and, to do that, I knew something about the way I was going about my learning needed to change.
My new goal, decided upon in the throne-room-esque Nu Pi Kappa room in Ascension, in the glow of the stained glass filtering through the windows, was to start raising my hand once a week — to put my palm straight into the air when I felt that I had a vague notion of the work I had read in the days before class.
I made a promise to myself to simply absorb the information that my professor shared with the class. Rather than feeling like I needed to pick apart each and every detail, I wanted to see if becoming more comfortable with the space would, in turn, help me to be more confident in my ability to synthesize the assigned material.
As innocuous as this decision might seem to some, for me, it proved difficult. At first, I shied away from making myself heard and seen. I worried that if I didn’t sound as scholarly as my fellow classmates, that I would be perceived as someone who wasn’t meant to be there. This was absolutely not true, but it took me a few more lectures to come to that conclusion.