The ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius argued that being around good people is like entering a room filled with the scent of herbs. Over time, you will no longer notice the unique scent of each herb, as each herb has already melded into one scent. Participating in a Bates classroom environment is exactly the same process. Just like herbs, each student has their own academic abilities, perspectives, and ways of thinking. But when you enter a learning environment filled with different intellectual perspectives, your own mind gradually begins to change from what you learned in Bates’s classroom. This means you become part of an academic fraternity of different ideas and worldviews that ultimately challenge old ways of thinking and give you new perspectives.
In most classes at Bates, professors typically emphasize the importance of a growth mindset at the beginning of a new semester. A growth mindset leads students to believe that they can improve and develop through dedication, hard work, and even by making and learning from mistakes. During her three and a half years at Bates, she found the classroom environment to not only teach her future-ready expertise, but to develop transferable skills and an all-around mindset in today’s society.
Although Bates is relatively small, it is an inclusive community where you can meet and interact with many different types of people. In class, your classmates’ thoughts, actions, and interactions with you can influence how you think in class. In this article, I would like to share some moments that changed my own thinking, both in academic and non-academic aspects of life.
The first moment I want to share was during the first two weeks of “Math 110: Great Ideas in Mathematics” of the Winter 2023 semester, when Professor Grace Colomb taught me the importance of a growth mindset. As a student who majored in history and minored in education, I wasn’t very interested in math, so I was never good at it. However, since quantitative and formal reasoning is one of his Bates modes of inquiry, he needed to take one class to meet my major requirements.
Initially, I was worried that I would not be able to do well in Math 110 due to my lack of experience. However, during the first week of class, Grace spent half her time discussing growth mindset, accompanied by reading and reflection assignments. Why do math classes need to include more education-focused content, such as assigning reading materials that directly discuss growth mindset and how mathematicians study mathematical theory through a growth mindset? I wondered if there was one. After Grace discussed how a growth mindset contributes to learning progress, especially for students new to college-level math, I gradually understood her reasoning. If you become reluctant to learn new knowledge when faced with difficulties, you will gradually doubt yourself and find it difficult to improve your abilities.
Still, a growth mindset can change your attitude toward learning unfamiliar knowledge by guiding you to practice, make mistakes, and reflect on yourself for further improvement. Difficulties will not make you give up, but will actually drive you to seek new knowledge. For example, after my first week of classes at Grace, I started working with friends for peer learning and practice review to understand how equations and concepts work when solving certain types of problems. I started asking questions. During this period, my approach to learning completely unfamiliar knowledge changed. Rather than resist and remain confused, I chose this challenge and accepted it as an opportunity to gain new knowledge.
Another thing I would like to share is my preparation for a group presentation in the history course “20th Century America.” I was to work with her group of four students to complete a project. But when we started choosing the topic and dividing the tasks, one of the members of the group suddenly disappeared. She never responded to our messages or emails and never contributed anything to the PowerPoint. We spent most of our time thinking about how to connect with her to advance our presentations, both during in-class discussions and after-class meetings.
The reason our group recognized the importance of this is that this presentation is evaluated based on everyone’s efforts before evaluating each individual’s performance. In other words, if one member of your group is missing, your final grade will drop significantly. But four days before the deadline, she still couldn’t get in touch with her. Eventually, we all wrote an email to Professor Bernadino and asked him to remove the member from the group. They decided that waiting wouldn’t help the presentation, and the rest of the team decided they needed to reorganize their roles. After 24 hours, Professor Bernardino granted our request. But it also meant we had to rethink the structure and length of our presentations. If one person is missing, each of her three members in the group will have to present more than before. Fortunately, we all had group meetings during class and after school to work on our presentations, and in the end we were able to get a satisfactory grade.
From this experience, I felt that it is important to prepare for unexpected changes in future group work. The lack of reaction from our teammates was a sudden change that sent us into a panic. But instead of panicking and not being able to resume my real work, this moment in class encouraged me to think differently to find ways to solve problems and find important people. Plans never keep pace with change, so we must always be prepared for the unexpected, stay calm and find alternative solutions.
From the above two moments, I learned a lot more than I knew in the Bates community. There may be moments when you feel confused or struggling, finding it difficult to understand new knowledge or concepts, or panicking about unpredictable changes. When we graduate from college and become adults, we may face similar challenges. However, in the Bates community, we may experience similar cases in our classes that challenge our existing understanding. But as we face these “challenges” we can also refresh our minds as we gain experience from this moment and new ways of thinking prepare us for future endeavors.