Second place alumni essay

I attended CC in the earliest years of the Block Plan. When I applied for admission, I did not understand the pedagogy, but the idea sounded novel and interesting, and that was a good enough reason to try it. As it happened, I loved my time at CC, but I don’t think I really appreciated the full pedagogical value of the Block Plan until later — when I moved into a teaching career several years after having studied in a traditional semester system in law school.

What I know now is that the Block Plan is the place where higher education comes closest to achieving its ideals. By allowing both teachers and students to devote all of their intellectual and emotional energies to a single class, the Block Plan unleashes the potential for truly magical educational encounters. This did not happen in every class at CC, of course. As in all educational settings, there were times when the teachers failed to engage the students; at other times the students were unfocused or the group chemistry wasn’t right, and the class simply didn’t gel.

But more often, when teachers and students freed of other obligations brought the very best of themselves into the class, the results were stunning. For me, the highlights were the painful historical journey across the devastating landscape of the 20th century in Europe — through war, depression, and the Holocaust — with Susan Ashley, and working through economic policy questions in a region of resource depletion, pollution, and Native American reservations with Walt Hecox ’64. In such courses, we students did not simply learn; together with our master teachers, we lived through an educational experience. For each of us, such a class became a kind of watershed in one’s own life. On the deepest level, I continue to feel the effects of these experiences 30 years after the mere 3 1 ¼ 2 or seven weeks that I spent in each class.

Today I am a law school teacher, and my professors at CC remain my best role models. Although I teach in a semester system, I strive in each of my courses to re-create for my students as nearly as possible the Block Plan’s intensity and depth of learning. My best courses at CC are the ideal, the goal I keep constantly before me and try to reach in my teaching. From time to time, I get close. And these Proustian moments, in which I can again “taste” the pleasure of being in a teacher-student relationship under the Block Plan, are the most cherished of my professional life.