Keep College Uncomfortable

In all honesty, I sailed through school until college. I understood things and got great grades with very, very minimal effort. The initial pain came from Intro to Ethics my first semester. I didn’t understand how college could be so different, but it was. I didn’t know how to study because I only studied a little bit in my last two years of high school, and basically none before that.

Intro to Ethics taught me to explain my thoughts by using various philosophers’ ethical systems. I hated the class, but realize it did good things for me. We had to read, talk, and write about uncomfortable scenarios three days a week for 14 weeks.

When I first started college, I only had a vague idea of what major I wanted. So, I spent two years taking general education and exploratory courses. In my second semester, I took three weeks of biology. It only lasted three weeks because I couldn’t stand feeling dumb and crying because nothing made sense.

Now, in my fourth year of college, I’m taking Biology in Your World. Much to my pleasure, just about everything makes sense! I’m now able to relate biological concepts to agriculture, and that makes all the difference.

In this week’s biology lab, the teaching assistant was winding down class, going over our reflection questions. The last three questions related to a woman who wants to be a mother, but may carry Huntington's disease. We had to answer if we thought she should get tested for the diseased allele, and if we thought she should have a baby or not.

The TA dismissed class before even reading the questions aloud, which she had done with all the others. Her exact reasoning was because the topic was too uncomfortable, and she didn’t want to make students uncomfortable.

Do we not want to talk about uncomfortable things?

College should shape wannabe adults into real adults. I’m sure some students had a solid answer with informed reasoning, and some didn’t care and were uninformed. We’ll never know.

Most classes encourage mature discussion mediated by the professor, but this class failed. Our opinions and positions will remain static if there’s no input. If we know a profound truth but never have the opportunity to say it, everyone around us loses. We can’t become “real adults” without uncomfortable conversations about real issues.

Let’s have an uncomfortable conversation sometime. Let’s learn. Let’s grow.