To Whitman, Walla Walla and beyond,
In my 4 years on this campus, I've experienced a ravenous amount. I've thought about much. I've done some. I regret little.
Rather than pitifully attempt to summarize...
Friday, May 8th was a landmark date for young people in Walla Walla. The first major gathering of young activists in Walla Walla: involving youth from Whitman College, Walla Walla Community College (WWCC),...
I miss "The Ear," and my attempts to resurrect it through alternative means have resulted in a stalled Tumblog and Music Video Meltdowns (which Molly Smith and Sara Rasmussen tell me are great, but then...
The cliché that liberal arts schools teach their students how to think has never made sense to me in the context of Whitman. Although official rhetoric about the school promotes “diversity," diversity of thought among students seems strongly discouraged.
The process of grading is an integral component of this agenda.
Since the boom in the assessment movement, public schools across the country have become obsessed with presenting students with a certain kind of knowledge that they can apply to the SAT and other standardized tests.
Despite the heroic and thankless work of a small number of primary and secondary school educators who attempt to teach their students to think critically, the vast majority of the curricula across the country is concerned with imparting a certain “standardized" form of knowledge.
The way that the geniuses that came before us decided to track understanding was through a numeric scale running 0.0-4.0. Certainly, there are some institutions that use a 0-10 scale, but this doesn't address my fundamental concern, which is that grades are a reductive way to measure progress and evaluate knowledge.
Several weeks ago, The Pioneer listed "town-gown tension" as the seventh-worst thing about attending Whitman.
"Townies," as citizens of Walla Walla are called, are viewed with amusement, fear and ignorance...
Pigs will kill you and your family!
Or, at least, that's what the mainstream media seems to be portraying. After a slew of infections and deaths in Mexico, it seemed as if this novel virus was prepared...
Summer time is fast approaching and soon we will all burst forth from the Whitman bubble. With papers to write and final exams to take, it's easy for us to complain about how hard our lives at Whitman...
Whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, a conformist greek or a lonely indie, a Pio purist or a Seccession insurgent, one issue should unite us all: a Supreme Court term limit.
Last week Justice...
I know that people talk about how good French "cuisine" is all the time, but let me tell you: the cuisine is pretty decent, but the whole approach to food is what's really bangin'. No matter what you're...
The whole campus is littered with posters about alcohol abuse and sexual misconduct. These posters are horribly ineffective. I wish they weren't so bad, but they are.The message and the point behind these...
Now that the first 100 days of the Obama presidency have passed, what should we as a nation pressure the president to concentrate on for the rest of the presidency? What issues are most pressing to the...
Time does fly. Doesn't September seem so far away? Yet paradoxically, the weather in Walla Walla seems to come full circle. At the beginning of the year, it's shirtless and sunshine on Ankeny and at the end of the year it's shirtless, sunshine (hopefully) and nostalgia. Now, just in conversations with friends, it seems like everyone's reflecting upon the past year. What have I done? What did I miss out on? What can I do to make up for lost time? I never expected the end of my sophomore year to be an art project, two tests and a paper away.
The thing with time is that you never get it back; it slips through your fingers the harder you try to hold on to it. It ticks and tocks when you want it to go by faster and it disappears in a haze of laughter until you realize it's three a.m.
Adults, not just people 18-and-up but the people with real jobs, always told me that time passes faster and faster when you get older and I never really knew why until now. It's because they don't get surprised as often as we do.
At the end of last year, I was excited to be done with freshman year because sophomore year loomed on the horizon. Being a first-year meant always being surprised and amazed by the parties, the workload, and just being away from home, by yourself. Sometimes, your surprise reflects your naiveté but we're all pretty quick on the uptake.
