A Teacher's Perspective
The Dell and Cannon Newspaper
Ransom Everglades School
Coconut Grove, FL
Picture, if you will, a glorious 8,000 acre college campus in California. The skies are a brilliant azure and humidity doesn’t exist! Your activity depends upon the moment. Perhaps you are reenacting the trial of Socrates in the shadowy realm of the old chapel. Maybe you are drawing sketches as you sit in wonder before Rodin’s bronze masterpiece “The Gates of Hell” before launching into a fascinating discussion of an excerpt from Dante’s Inferno. If you are lucky, you may be sitting in the shade of a cluster of oak trees as you share your views on Vonnegut, Lahiri, or Borges. But then the scene shifts. You have donned your water apparel and honor a glorious Stanford tradition by jumping with your peers into the first of four refreshing fountains on a summer day, happily splashing each other as you amuse visitors from a foreign country.
To date, forty-nine of our Ransom students have taken part in this glorious experience known as the Great Books Summer Program. While some have ventured to Stanford’s campus, others have enjoyed the beauty of Amherst College in Massachusetts. This summer, Great Books is proud to open its third campus at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. For me, as a teacher, the opportunity is exhilarating. I am privileged to serve as the Academic Director for the intermediate program at Stanford and the co-director of the senior program at Amherst College. Mornings are dedicated to brief and dynamic interactive lectures followed by what most students consider the highlight of their experience: the shared inquiry discussions where students critically examine excerpts from both classical and modern literature. After lunch (and the food is terrific), students enjoy elective offerings (music, art, drama, writing) and then some afternoon fun ranging from the aforementioned fountain hopping to ultimate Frisbee to a fierce game of Jenga! The evenings are special as each night’s activity (quiz bowl, mixer, theater games) leads up to Friday’s awe-inspiring student performances where elective participants get to strut their collective stuff. For me, the PA’s (program assistants) are the real backbone of the program. These counselors come from colleges all across the nation and this internship is rated as one of the finest in the country. It amazes me how Great Books manages to find such motivated college students every year, many of them returning on an annual basis because they can’t get enough of the program or the motivated professors and students.
So back to your imagination! Perhaps you would like to see some of Emily Dickinson’s original documents or even her only surviving daguerreotype in the archives of the Robert Frost library at Amherst. Or, if you’re in the two week program, you may venture off to the Muir Woods in California to start your travelogue as Thoreau or Kerouac might have. Regardless of your choice, it is a virtual guarantee that your experience with the Great Books Summer Program will have a lasting effect on how you perceive and interact with the best literature of classic and modern times.
Christopher Dreeson
Faculty, Language Arts, Ransom Everglades School
Academic Director, Intermediate Program, Stanford University
Great Books Summer Program
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