One Month Crimson (Part One)

1. One Month

   I still remember the emotions I had the moment I set my foot on this unfamiliar land. Opposite to my parents’ concern, I wasn’t afraid nervous at all. It was more of curious and excited, and of course, exhausted.

   It was raining when I arrived at Harvard campus. It was a typical New England morning, chilly enough to make me, a southerner from China, put on the long-sleeve jacket I brought from home and still trembling while stepping my feet.

   That Saturday was long and confusing; but fortunately, I met a girl in Harvard Hall in which we were getting our keys. She’s also assigned to Thayer, and we decided to do the rest of the registration together.

   Defne, that’s her name. We met another boy Coco when we were having lunch in Au Bou Pain in Harvard Square. Both of them remained to be my really good friends, though due to a lot of reasons we were not able to hang out often.

   I moved into Thayer, quickly cleaned my luggage, and was reading to live in the suite I was assigned to for the rest of the summer.

   The room was better than I expected. I shared it with my only roommate, Virginia, who didn’t show up until Saturday afternoon. We have a common room, which is as big as my parents’ bedroom back home, and we have one bedroom with two beds and two drawers. Each of us has a closet, a lamp, a desk and a bookshelf. Although Thayer is one of the oldest freshman dorms in the Yard, it has been renovated; that’s why it’s generally newer in comparison to other dorms. It’s also the biggest and most populated dorms in the Yard; the entire floor shares a bathroom (it’s what I hate about Thayer most). Its appearance is not as stylish as other dorms. It’s a very stubborn and boring building from the outside, at the same time simple and organized from the inside.

    That evening our entrée had dinner together. There were only girls in our entrée way, about ten to fifteen in total. Right from that dinner, I decided that I wasn’t going to hang out with these people. No offense, but I really think they are immature and not smart. That evening I went to the first floor to visit a friend, Bianca, I’d known on Facebook. Since then, she and her roommates became really close with me.

    The next day I decided to buy a sim card. However the t-mobile shop in Harvard Square didn’t open until noon, so I decided to go to the AT&T store with another friend I met in Facebook Thayer group, Brandon. We trusted google map and went all the way to Alewife. It took us two wrong turns and several stops to get there. Eventually we got there, and guess what, it didn’t open until noon as well; it was eleven when we were standing in front of the AT&T store, laughing bitterly.

     The weekends passed quickly, and my first week in Harvard Summer school officially began.

2. Courses

   I consulted my foreign teacher Jon when I was registering courses online. Eventually I decided to take The Essay and a summer seminar, The Meaning of Madness. The latter was a psychology course, and it clearly indicated that it’s not recommended for high school students.  Still, I would like to give myself a shot. However, the first class was somehow very frustrating, for we had fifteen students in our class, only three of them (including me) were high school students. Nearly all of them had some basic knowledge in psychology, there was even one Harvard undergraduate who majored in it. Though I could understand the class quite well, it’s still hard for me to involve in the class discussion, which was a very dangerous thing for a class that small.

   I was quite sure at first that I wasn’t going to drop it, and I forgot all the frustration by the next day. Tuesday morning, I experienced the most inspiring and lively class I’d even taken in my entire life.

   It was an expository writing course; the professor was Jill McDonough. I only got to know that she teaches in Boston University from the website, but I didn’t expect that she also teaches in Harvard and in the state prison. She’s a woman full of energy and inspiration. She can come up with sentences with accurate structure and precise words as she speaks them out loud; she doesn’t need time to think, all those sentences just jump out of her mouth and they are already quite perfect. She forces us to express our ideas precisely; no vagueness can be accepted. When we are expressing our ideas, she usually squeezes more and more out of them; at last we are all surprised with our capacity of deep thinking and processing information, and she’s the one who helps us achieve that.

   The first class was amazing. We were first asked to remember everybody’s name, and then we wrote something about ourselves for twenty minutes. I was really nervous at first, since everybody else’s essays all started with “my name is…” and went on to talk about some details about their lives, but mine was more about how I grew up in the most crowded country in the world and managed to survive in the competitive environment and all that. I didn’t manage to finish my essay, since I threw away my first draft and started all over again after ten minutes. Surprisingly, Jill high praised my way of depicting the environment in which I was raised instead of writing like everybody else. I was a little overwhelmed by her compliment, and from then I started to be active in the class discussion because of the confidence I gained.

   We debate a lot during classes. In the first class we discussed what’s failure and what’s success, and I gave an example to suggest the subjectivity of these two terms. A successful murder, I said, was a success to the offender himself, but overall it was a social failure to the society. Jill teaches in the prison, I guess that’s why she loves this idea. Since then she constantly jokes about this murder example, and I’m the target of every topic relating to murder, massacre and violence. In other classes, we argued what’s beauty, what’s art, and does something beautiful need to have an intrinsic virtue. Throughout these discussions, we all start to understand that simply give an idea or an opinion is not idea; you have to dig into your own thoughts and support your claim explicitly.

   Discussion is not enough for an expository writing course; our focus, for sure, is on writing. At first we have to write response paper to every article we read; we need to outline the arguments, the counterarguments and the summary of main ideas in the articles. We learn to apply the elements (thesis statement, claim, evidence, analysis, counterargument) to our own essays.

   The first unit is about education, and our first formal paper is to find a thesis statement, supporting or countering an argument in the articles, and to write a four to five pages about that thesis. In each paragraph, all five elements should be included, and we need to have an extra page of citation.  

   The process was somehow, contrary to most people’s opinion towards writing a paper, not painful at all. It was a process of looking for information, pinning down the sources, organizing ideas, and repeating revising the paper.

   At last I came out with a piece of writing that I thought was explicit and rich, and at the end of my meeting with Jill, she said that after some small corrections of grammatical errors and improper structures, I could get an A.

   That’s where complacency filled up in me and tragedy began to happen.

   When Jill handed out our midterm papers, I found out I only god a B+. Though to many other students it was a cheerful result, to me, since Jill clearly told me that I could get an A, the result was disappointing and painful. Going back to the text and reading my own paper, I found out the problems were all about spelling or punctuation, which should not exist at all after so many times of revision. I felt disappointed, but there’s no way I could alter the situation. The only chance I get to prove myself is the final paper.

   The second unit is about art, which is a very challenging topic to all of us. I haven’t received much serious education on art, and every time when Jill starts to talk about some pieces of work, my knowledge about them are a total blank. That’s why I’m so eager to go to the art museums she recommends to us; there’s few chances in China to visit museums and carefully inspect works of art.

   On Thursday (tomorrow) we’re supposed to have another three hour session, but Jill decides to give us a day off for us to visit the museums and find evidence to support the thesis statement we’re going to use in our final paper. To most of my friends, it’s a piece of news that arouses jealousy and sometimes even contempt; for example, Jenny despises my choice of registering in this course, she thinks I can learn nothing from it, and writing it what she does everyday at school. I have to remind her every time that I don’t go to school in the best private high school in Vancouver, I go to a very Chinese Chinese high school. I don’t have the chance to observe, explore, and write everyday. I believe that’s the reason why I’m taking two humanity courses this summer: I need to use this opportunity to experience something I’ve never done before and would never have the chance to do in my own country.

   Another course I’m currently taking is Law and Psychology. After the first class of The Meaning of Madness, I tried two other courses: Biomedical Ethics and The Economic and Political development of Russia and China. The former one is taught by an old professor, who speaks so softly that I couldn’t hear him at all when I was trying the course for the first time with Jenny and Bianca. They decided to stay, while I left an hour after the class started. On Tuesday night I tried the other course. Again, it was because of the professor that I didn’t stay, though I met some very amazing classmates.

   At the same time, nearly all of my friends were taking Law and Psychology and were complaining about the large amount of reading they had to do for the second class. They needed to finish a four-hundred-page book in a day and a half, which was about serial killers and criminal profiling. As I was still hesitating about whether I should change my course or not, Bianca and Jenny decided for me that I should go to Law and Psychology with them. They talked about the amazing professor and the intriguing focus of the course. Without another second of consideration, I boldly decided that I was going to drop the seminar and join them.

   But the homework was a huge problem: I only got four hours to finish that book; in fact, I hadn’t had the textbooks at all. So I spent sixty dollars that morning to buy the textbooks from Harvard Coop, and spent the entirely morning devouring Mindhunter.

   The first class I had for Law and Psychology was a great experience. It was Wednesday so we had sessions and discussions (usually on Monday we have big lectures). Since I didn’t get the chance to finish the entire book or to do close reading on the chapter that we were going to talk about, I wasn’t active in the discussion at all. However, in another session in which we were learning about mental illness and DSM, I got the chance the answer a lot of the questions, since I already learned a lot of the things about DSM in the first class of The Meaning of Madness, and the reading assignment for that session was also the pre-reading of the seminar. In the other session (we have three sessions in total), I wasn’t allowed to talk because I wasn’t registered. It sounded very arbitrary but the professor was really funny, so nobody took that as an offense.

   The first thing I did after the class was over was to go to the registrar to change my course.

   The following experience in Law and Psychology was interesting and fruitful. I know my mom wouldn’t want me to take this course at all, since it has so many things to do with crimes, killers and abnormal mental state, but it’s also something I would never get the chance to experience back in China. Also, I fancy the amount of reading we need to do for every class. It’s pretty intense at the beginning, but then we started to get less reading, but the reading becomes more serious as well. Mindhunter is more like a detective novel; No Crueler Tyrannies was accounts of several major miscarriages of justice in the conviction of child abuses; the two Thinking About books were like A Hundred Thousand of Whys: in each paragraph, there’s a question and there’s the answer. There are also several major cases we need to focus on, most of them concerning insanity defense.

   The midterms came pretty soon, and I was really freaked out because of it. It consisted of a take-home essay, two in-class close-book essays (half an hour for each) and half an hour of short answers. The take-home essay question is ambiguous: it asks us to rank the importance of four lessons in criminal/racial/ethical profiling. What exactly does “lesson” mean? I struggled for a while and decided that it meant four elements of criminal profiling, so I chose race, personality, familiarity of the area, and age. It wasn’t like the essay I wrote in The Essay class; I generally supported my claims with cases from the books, and I expressed why the rank worked that way.

   The night before I handed in my essay, I started to become so unsure of myself, since all the other people I knew didn’t interpret the question in the way I did. They listed something like “behavior reflects personality” and “don’t rush to conclusion” and things like that. I was anxious and depressed, so I called Christopher and asked for consolation. He said I could email him the question and my essay, and he would give me his opinions. I asked Bianca and Jenny if this was a type of cheating, since we were supposed to finish the entire thing on our own. But Christopher said he would only tell me if he though my interpretation was the same as his or otherwise different, but he wouldn’t tell me how exactly he thought the question was suggesting. Also, he’s not in the course, so there’s no possibility of him knowing the things I wrote about. Jenny and Bianca didn’t suggest me doing so; Bianca said it was cheating (but she herself wanted to read my essay). I was super unsure but at last it turned to a joke: I did e-mail the question and the essay, but Christopher didn’t receive them. The next day when he told me this, I no longer wanted other people’s agreement or approval. I didn’t touch my essay at all, and I turned it in as soon as I walked into the exam room.

   The rest of the midterms went on smoothly. The two other essays were not difficult, and the short answers were not as hard as I thought. However, it wasn’t until the exam result came out that I felt greatly relieved. Though I believe I did my best in the exam, I still felt like I was going to fail the exam (for no reason). While other classmates were so eager to know the result, I remained calmly in my seat and waited until other people had got their exam paper and left. The professor piled all the exam material and handed them out. As I got my pile, I was so nervous as well as excited. I struggled between reading them and waiting until I was in my room to open it. I held the pile facing down, and all out of sudden I saw the letter on the last page of the pile. It was an A.

   Up to now, it still shocked me that I, in fact, got an A in a class that was consisted of many native English-speaking high school, or even undergraduate students. As I read my review on the three essays for the exam, I got every aspect of the essay right. It might be indication of the effectiveness of taking The Essay.

   I really enjoy the experience learning here in Harvard. It’s not only the courses, but also all of the professors and the students and the environment in which I study. I like going to Widener’s Philips reading room, sitting there quietly, absorbing every detail I’m reading. I like going to the computer lab, sitting in front of a giant Mac and enjoying the 786 MB/s Internet speed. I like wandering through shelves after shelves in Lamont, smelling the scent of books that are hundred years old.

   Harvard is a great place to study; and I’ll miss so much about the academic environment it provides to its students after the summer ends. And more ambitiously, before the fall returns.

(To be continued...)