Tutorials

Think about one of your classes at UGA (or at the university you’re attending/did attend). Imagine the crowded classroom – some students texting friends before class starts, others listening to their iPods, some just engaging in loud conversation until the teacher calls the class to attention and starts the lecture. Slowly everyone slouches down a bit in their chairs and listens half-heartedly as the professor drones on about the subject matter.

Now take that same class and remove everyone but two other students and your professor. Suddenly there’s an entirely different dynamic to the class. You find yourself sitting up a little straighter in your seat. The teacher asks the three of you a question, but you can’t resort to avoiding eye contact and hoping someone else in the class will answer (preferably someone who actually read the material for class today) like you usually do. You just have to make some sort of intelligent response and hope the teacher can make sense of your semi-coherent ramblings. Now you know what it’s like to take a class with an Oxford professor.

This can be an intimidating environment because all of a sudden you’re not just a number in a class of 300 people. You’re in the spotlight for an hour once a week. You’re expected to explain Wordsworth’s style of poetry and shades of meaning in Lyrical Ballads, or compare the three Virginia Woolf novels you had to read for this week’s class.

But after you get through the awkward pauses and seemingly impossible questions, you start to feel a sense of accomplishment because you muddled through an excruciating hour-long class every week. Your professor remembers your name at the end of the day and recalls the interesting point you made in your last session. And you have a better knowledge of the subject matter, partly because you’ve become interested in what your small class has been discussing and partly because you had to read the material before class so you wouldn’t sound like an uneducated moron. So perhaps taking this class wasn’t such a bad idea after all...