Dispatches From an MFA Program: The Definition of Learning

"Can I just share with you?"

This phrase, in one of my classes, often leads to a long musing on writing and/or publishing and/or editing. My professor has had a fascinating career in journalism, translation, editing and writing. Things I've learned from said professor's autobiographical musings:

• The IRS is, apparently, very helpful if you call them about what you can deduct on your taxes.
• Speaking of which, registering yourself as a business makes your life a lot easier.
• Americans abroad are probably being placed in awkward positions very often, thanks to a certain politician who shall remain unnamed. Said professor was often asked what Americans saw in Bush while working as a foreign correspondent, so said professor is very grateful not to be abroad now.
• Only 2% of the books sold in the US and UK are works in translation, a number far below most of the rest of the world.

Only the last one has anything at all to do with the subject of the class itself. On a typical day of class, we hear at least three iterations of "Can I just share?" This is utterly maddening to some of my classmates. And, on most days, me.


But recently, I've been thinking that maybe "learning" just means something different in my MFA program. I have changed learning styles before. I studied in India from kindergarten through 9th grade and there, learning often involved vast amounts of memorization. Although I hated having to memorize entire essays in Hindi (and still don't see any value in it), I realize that some things, like multiplication tables, are best learned by drilling. I did so much drilling that I can tell you, at a second's notice, what 7 times 9 is (63, by the way). When I moved to the US the summer before my sophomore year of high school, I began singing songs to learn French conjugations, reading Shakespeare aloud in class, watching videos about history and devising science experiments in class. I loved the more hands-on approach, but it took me a little while to get used to it.


So, maybe this is just another new learning style. As I've gone further along in my education, I've had to take more and more responsibility for my learning. Gone are the days when I spent an entire class period analyzing Brutus and Antony's speeches from Julius Caesar. I moved on to analyzing an act at a time. Then a few acts. Then a play at a time. And now, I read books that are several hundred pages long and spend maybe an hour talking about them in class. I'd argue that I learn as much, or more, from those several hundred page books than I did from a single speech.


I notice the way an author's sentences look on the page. If I'm particularly struck by the effect of a sentence, I'm more likely to stop and figure out what about that sentence is causing its effect. I don't always wait for a professor or a classmate to point it out.


Teaching is not (and sometimes, not able to be) the highest priority on my professors' lists. Whether they're flying around on book tours and speaking engagements, whether they're working on deadline to submit a piece to a newspaper, I get the impression that they spend less time planning classes than my undergraduate professors did. But, they have connections all over the place. They're all published, they have agents, they know the editors of various literary magazines. I'm suddenly separated by a few degrees from people like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Eula Biss. I also have access to a vast range of knowledge on local and national publications.


I heard several times during my undergraduate degree that you get out of college what you put into it. Perhaps the same is even truer of graduate school.

Read more of Rukmini's work on Floodmark.