Watch your premises

Earlier this year, the Academic Council passed a proposal that will require all students, beginning with next year's freshman class, to satisfy the elementary level of study in a foreign language. Its supporters claimed that, while this will have little or no effect on most incoming students, it shows that the school is committed to a globally-aware education. The following is my response to part of their argument.

Somewhere in my mother's house there is a folder patterned with bright yellow, pink, green and blue, the number seven (my age when it was new), and my name and the word "French" crafted in bold Sharpie.

My first attempt at foreign language study did not last very long. But since then I have explored, for lesser or longer times, five other spoken languages. That does not include French, which I studied again briefly in high school - under a tutor, since Bethany only offers Spanish - and through my first year here.

I love studying languages. I love when I can read a paragraph in French and find myself stopped, laughing because I understand these words written in a language that is not my own. I have been amazed (and often frustrated) to read a text in two languages and understand each well enough to glimpse the change in meaning effected or possible through its translation.

This does not come to me through the progression of courses that my schools have required I take. I had already fulfilled Bethany's language requirement, with two years' Spanish classes, when I returned to French in my senior year. I wanted, in part, to continue with something I'd left unfinished ten years earlier. Maybe I also found it annoying that one of the only things I could say in French was, "J'ai perdu le 'do' de ma clarinette."

I did not have to go back to French. I wanted it. Strange, isn't it, if what a new professor said some months ago were true: "Students are the same all over the world. They don't want to learn something that they don't have to" (qtd. from "New Foreign Language Requirement?," Feb. 3).

Well, guess what. It's not just languages; I love learning. I always have. That's why I'm in college now - not for a better job, not for a heightened ego, and not for some elusive party scene. That's why I love working on the Weather Vane's website; it's why all of my courses this semester are from different departments, why I'm auditing a course that has no place on my ratings sheet and participating in a "heavy" book discussion outside my classes, and why I've had a hard time deciding on any one major. It's why at two years old I couldn't wait for preschool and at five, kindergarten. And it's why schools have so consistently disappointed me.

Perhaps someone would insist that I must not be a "normal" student. Don't bother; I know it. Years of coercive schooling have failed in me, failed to teach me that I don't like to learn. They have failed to teach me that the will to learn must or can be regulated.

No, I am not a normal student: I am a real student. And if an added curricular stipulation will attract the sort of person this university wants, it seems that I am out of place.