On Being Known

Isn’t part of the problem in the culture at large a lack of the personal correction and encouragement that accompany truly being known to those around us? Don Rags sessions have an immediate effect on the behavior of students, as professors often notice, but they mean more than that. This kind of recognition helps personal growth, sometimes radically, and increases students’ confidence, because they have been singled out and addressed in person.

The Scottish poet Robert Burns might be best remembered for two lines: “O wad some Power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us!” It would be a blessing, in other words, if some power gave us the gift to see ourselves as others see us. We have an inner sense of who we are, but does it match what others see about us? How are we actually doing, and who are we in the eyes of those around us?

In the academic world, grades are of course one gauge of how students are doing, but they are blunt instruments at best. One of the gifts of being a student at Wyoming Catholic College is the practice called “Don Rags,” in which several days are set aside, as they have been this week, to allow our students to undergo (how’s that for euphemistic phrasing?) personal examination and encouragement by the faculty. It can be daunting: one by one, each freshman or sophomore student meets with all of his or her professors at the same time. Picture a first-semester freshman six weeks or so into her college career coming through the door, escorted by a professor (cf. Hermes, Guide of Souls), and sitting down at the hollow square before the gazes of five or six other ones who bring to bear on her the converging beams of curricular scrutiny.

As the session gets underway, the Humanities professor might comment on the student’s good observations in class but add that her spotty performance on quizzes suggests that she needs to do a better job of keeping up on her reading. The Theology professor might say that her silence in his class is surprising, especially if she talks so much in Humanities. What explains the difference? And so on around the room through various subjects—logic, Latin, field science, written rhetoric, the outdoor program. The student receives both encouragement and criticism; she has time to explain her inconsistencies and pose a few questions about how she might do better. All in all, the session takes only 10 minutes or so, but it gives the student a clear sense of being known by name and in detail as a person, not just as an anonymous presence in the classroom.

Wyoming Catholic College did not invent Don Rags, which originated at Oxford University, but we are one of a rare group of colleges using the practice. Such sessions could never happen at larger American universities. Even to have two of one’s professors in the same place at the same time would be a remarkable coincidence at a state university, for example, where classes in subjects wholly unrelated to each other take place in various buildings across a large campus. Especially in the first two years, anonymity is more the rule in students’ classes than the exception. It would be unlikely for any of their dorm mates to have the same courses or professors; they might find common ground in other ways, but not necessarily the best ones. Students eventually become recognizable to the professors in their majors, but in the meantime, important dimensions of being known simply do not come into play, as they would in a close community.

Last spring in a conversation about our policy forbidding cell phones, a freshman told me that when she had her phone in high school, she was able to fine-tune her image online. She had a kind of constructed identity not subject to inspection or correction, but also not really who she was—a variety of anonymity. It was made possible by a technology that seems to move us more and more away from the immediacy of real community and into inner isolation.

Don Rags sessions are an answer to anonymity, but the same kind of answer also characterizes our shared and integrated curriculum. In each class, each student and the professor have the text, the ideas under discussion, to think about, a situation that makes possible a kind of revelation of the other and a recognition. Then, in the wider community, the discussions generated in the texts forge a wider bond. In their four years at Wyoming Catholic College, all students take the same classes and read the same great books. Entering freshmen know that when they read the Iliad and the Odyssey, for example, that they can talk about them with any upperclassman. Sophomores might explain that the actual Fall of Troy gets its fullest account in Book II of the Aeneid. and seniors might point out that the heroic Odysseus of Homer’s poems turns into a major villain of Virgil’s epic, not to mention one of the most accomplished and convincing of the false counselors damned in Dante. Even before he or she leaves the first semester of freshman year, the student has a sense of a broadening and deepening context, and also a sense of being known to upperclassmen at a certain earlier stage of the transformational process taking place through the curriculum itself.

Isn’t part of the problem in the culture at large a lack of the personal correction and encouragement that accompany truly being known to those around us? Don Rags sessions have an immediate effect on the behavior of students, as professors often notice, but they mean more than that. This kind of recognition helps personal growth, sometimes radically, and increases students’ confidence, because they have been singled out and addressed in person. As my wife likes to point out, Don Rags are like the scene in the Odyssey when Athena in disguise finds Telemachos and gives him the criticism and instruction that start him toward the discovery of his father. Discovering his father means discovering the tradition, which in turn means saving the household. And what is the household of Odysseus, rightly understood, but civilization itself?

Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College‘s weekly newsletter.

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The featured image is “Students enter the Natio Germanica Bononiae, the German nation at the University of Bologna,” image from the 15th century. It is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.