May 2005  |  Volume 1, Issue 1, Page 3

Gaining Perspectives
by Miriam Sznycer-Taub, A '05, and Rachel Taylor, A '05

Fifteen years of schooling and three years of college classes cannot entirely prepare you to teach. This is what we learned when we began to teach our Perspectives seminar last fall. We were excited at the prospect of working with freshmen when they first got to Tufts—guiding and helping them during Orientation Week, and then actually teaching throughout the fall semester. What we discovered was that being a Perspectives Leader was one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of our Tufts careers.

Choosing the topic for our course, Sports Movies, seemed like a logical thing for us to do. We both liked sports and sports movies, so we thought: how hard could it be to teach a class on something we are so passionate about? Naturally, we were mistaken. Shortly after planning began in August of last year we discovered that even with our somewhat scary addiction to Boston sports and our love of sports movies, teaching a class on the subject would not be easy. Deciphering the complex jargon of filmmaking while trying to understand the politics of the movie industry proved a challenge. We needed to understand movie basics in order to convey this information to our students in interesting and exciting ways. While one class a week did not seem like much time to fill, finding engaging material to fill the two and a half hour block each Monday was sometimes grueling. We found ourselves challenged—by our students, the ExCollege and ourselves—to come up with engaging classes. Looking back we feel that we tried our best. Clearly, some things worked better than others, but overall we hope we provided our students with an exciting and engaging semester

Dealing with the new role of being instructors and separating ourselves from being students was something neither one of us was prepared for. We began as advisors, helping our class through Orientation, through the challenges of picking classes, dealing with roommates and generally adjusting to life at Tufts. Once the semester started, we got a new glimpse at the lives of professors. It was very difficult to be both a friendly advisor and an instructor, a shoulder to lean on and a disciplinarian. While we had both written numerous papers during our time at Tufts, grading papers was arduous. We have a brand new appreciation for our professors and can only imagine how painful it must be to read through and grade multiple classes’ worth of papers each week.

Despite all these challenges, our Perspectives class remained the highlight of our week. Each Monday night had its own personality, whether it was due to a campus event, the movie we were discussing, the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry, or the beginning of Monday Night Football. Every class we all learned something new, be it about the movie or sports industries or about life at Tufts. Walking home from class, we often found ourselves remembering what it was like to be a freshman at Tufts and how much things have changed for us. It helped to have our weekly Perspectives seminar with the ExCollege. It provided us with a safe place to vent, ask questions, share stories, and talk with our fellow leaders, discovering that we were not alone in our challenges and struggles.

As the semester drew to a close, we were sad to let “our freshmen” go. We still look for them around campus, and have a sense of pride in what they have accomplished during their short time at Tufts. We were in the same Explorations class when we were freshman and never would have imagined we would end up teaching together in our senior year. We are content to know that the same opportunity awaits “our freshmen” should they choose to take it!

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