At this time of the school year, with scowling, stressed classmates and my own annoyingly endless to-do list, I usually hop on the good old Coach USA to pop this Cornell joint. Come Sunday night, I then have a neat little column — an account of a satisfying escapade, followed by some serious insistence that fellow classmates should also take some time to get away (it’s healthy). I’ve done this column a few times and will surely do it again, with great delight. But, this time, I will do something different for this column in November — I will be a good Cornell nerd and actually write about school.

But, fear not. It’s not a terribly nerdy class. I was recommended EDUC 240 “The Art of Teaching” very earnestly last spring by dear friend Inna Kleyman ’06. She described it briefly as an introductory class in Education that was largely built up around experiences volunteering in schools in the Ithaca area. She was then a Biological Sciences major headed for med school, and convinced me, an English major unsure of where she was headed, that this course was open to any sort of student at Cornell. It was the first course I requested for the fall semester.

Hearing about “The Art of Teaching” really got me buzzed and alight. Beyond being excited to take my very first Aggie class (out into the farmer fray!) to do fieldwork (to the townie tumult!) I was genuinely interested in exploring Teaching, with a capital T. Having grown up with many wonderful teachers, I always had a soft spot for teaching in High School as a proper grown-up career. I had been turned off by pursuing a degree in Education, not only because it seemed very dry and technical, but also because I felt should do some more educatin’ myself in the Liber’l Arts. Now, three years into Cornell, I was ready to take a step in that direction. This was going to be something really different and I was excited.

In the past three years, except for the odd math/science classes, nearly all of my courses have taken place on the Arts Quad. It’s been a lot of courses. Particularly English courses. There were also a handful in Art History and Near Eastern Studies. But, no mind — regardless of the department, there was to be inordinate amounts of reading, writing and talking. It’s wonderful, but I wanted to shake things up a little — add a little spangle-dangle to my Ivy League education.

When I started the class, it was different from the first day. We were thrown right in — there was no lengthy and draining discussion on the definition true meaning of education. We started with an energizing activity a lá summer camp, and then a diagram on “The Learning Process” was projected on the board. The diagram, a simple cyclical pattern, completely stumped me. It was not a bad diagram at all — I was just simply not used to processing information that way. Hand me Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde” and I can pick it apart OK. Give me a huge diagram and you will get squinty eyes and a request for a few more minutes. I realized I had been in Arts and Sciences way too long. I was so, so excited for this class.

In the first few weeks, as we learned about our volunteering options, I also learned about Cornell’s massive Public Service Center that provides endless volunteering opportunities, including local K-12 education. I would have loved to have known about this a few years earlier, but clearly, it slipped under my nose like so many other Cornell opportunities (those averse to under-nose-slipping, check out www.psc.cornell.edu or drop in at Barnes Hall). The PSC casts a wide net over the community and many, many options were available for my EDUC 240 classmates — some were placed at the ScienceCenter, some at a juvenile detention facility, others at the Montessori School. I was placed at the T-S-T Boces Community School.

I will describe it briefly. It’s small, located around the corner from the Taco Bell on Route 13. Boces is a New York State program intended to help students that were not successful in their local High Schools due to learning disabilities and emotional disorders. The students come from three county areas Tompkins-Seneca-Tioga, hence T-S-T. I go once a week, and each visit has been very memorable. At the start, I was often nervous and shy, but over time, classwork from EDUC 240 helped, getting to know the kids contributed to a valuable sense of confidence. Beyond this, it has given me considerable insight into the realities of learning disabilities in public education and the make-up of our surrounding community. My experiences and feelings for the school are too much for this column, but it is suffice to say that I have definitely acquired a much stronger sense for the value of good teaching and education.

All this I have learned from an off-beat class at Cornell, just crossing East Avenue. I got away — at school. As a student in Arts and Sciences, with 1,800 courses offered each year across its some 100 departments, I know well the value of a diverse education. But a diversity of education does not only exist in my Arts and Sciences, but throughout all of Big Red’s 18 colleges. The possibilities are endless. Last week, as a senior I scanned the course catalog for the last time, pre-enrolled for the last time and I am planning to take each class in a different college, as a farewell salute to my undergraduate education, my big years of sampling.

Erin Geld is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be contacted at esg24@cornell.edu. The Sampling appears alternate Wednesdays.