Learning the Material That Won't Be Tested

Ours was a fragmented class. We entered at different times, left at different times, returned at different times. Some of those who left didn't return. My own experience was fairly typical. I arrived at mid-year, just after my 17th birthday, left just after my 18th birthday to join the army, and returned after the war. Our undergraduate experience was compressed as well as fragmented. Mine lasted six semesters, including two summer semesters, and occupied two calendar years with a two-and-a half-year break between them.

Apart from the quality of the food served in the dining halls and the skewed age distribution of the student body, Harvard during my first year was not very different from what it had been like before Pearl Harbor.

Class distinctions were strongly marked. The sons of wealthy and socially-prominent families kept mostly to themselves. They could be glimpsed entering and leaving their clubs, wearing expensive suits of conservative cut, or, after dark, evening clothes. And frequently they could be seen at lectures, earning the three Cs and a D they needed to stay off academic probation.

By the time I got to Cambridge, this group was outnumbered by the sons of the prosperous middle class, who worked hard at their classes, engaged strenuously in extracurricular activities and sports, enjoyed an active social life and bought their clothes at the Coop.

Finally, there were students who didn't have time for extracurricular activities or sports or a social life and who bought few new clothes, because even if they had tuition scholarships they had to earn their keep, often by waiting on tables in student dining halls.

In 1943, the year I arrived, undergraduate classes were finally opened to Radcliffe students. Many Harvard students regarded these young women with a wariness bordering on hostility. This attitude mystified me, because (a) they were, after all, girls, and (b) they were on average a good deal smarter than we were. The mystery was cleared up for me many years later by my wife, who suggested that the source of the attitude was probably (b), although (a) might have been a contributing factor.

In any case, day-to-day relations between male and female students were constrained by geographical separation and strict parietal rules. On certain evenings, however, women could be brought as guests to Harvard dining halls, and men could be brought as guests to Radcliffe dining halls. I remember vividly my first appearance as a guest at dinner in Bertram Hall. I think I was the only male guest that evening, and my host and I made a late entrance. She escorted me past endless rows of tables where young women sat in dignified silence waiting for dinner to begin, never once glancing in our direction.

My inner-city high school hadn't been big on organized sports. I don't think it actually had any (though it did offer Latin and Greek). But I loved physical activity, and Harvard offered an undreamed-of variety of channels for it. I sampled as many as I could. I went to boxing and wrestling classes and swam in the Indoor Athletic Building, played intramural football (we had full uniforms and our own coach!), learned to play squash and rowed regularly on the Charles.

The University required first-years to take some form of regular exercise, if only calisthenics. As a group of us waited outside the I.A.B. to sign up for one of the courses that would satisfy this requirement, one member of the group--a young man of obvious refinement and sophistication-- delivered, in a charming middle-European accent, an extended jeremiad on the barbarous nature of a requirement so blatantly out of keeping with academic values and with civilized behavior in general.

A couple of weeks later I met the same classmate in English A1, a writing class open to (but not required of) students who had tested out of English A (the precursor of Expos). I had added this course on the last possible day, after steadily declining grades (49, 48 and 47 percent) on successive weekly quizzes had convinced me it would be prudent to drop introductory chemistry. I had 3,000 words to make up, but this seemed a small price to pay.

Our first assignment was to compare two or three English translations of the same passage in the Iliad. It was the most interesting assignment I'd ever had, and I still remember some of what I learned from it. Copies of the translations, along with the required and recommended books in all other undergraduate courses, occupied shelves that lined the Reading Room in Widener. There was plenty of room for them, and plenty of room to sit and read them at the long reading tables.

The instructor was the not-yet-legendary Robert Gorham Davis (who now, once again, lives and writes in Cambridge). A couple of years earlier he had urged a student to submit a story he'd written for the course to a national competition sponsored by Story magazine. The story won the competition. I was thrilled by this information because the author of the story, Norman K. Mailer '43, had lived in the suite next to mine in Eliot House.

At each class, Mr. Davis would select a piece of student writing to read and criticize. He wouldn't name the author, but a quick glance around the room often revealed a student with pink ears and an agonized expression. I assume that my classmate, the defender of civilized values, turned in more polished prose than I, for he became a well-known theatre critic.

But I did learn an important lesson: I was not destined to follow in Mailer's footsteps. My first serious effort at fiction was so inept that, rereading it a couple of weeks later, I burst out laughing.

My most enjoyable class during my two undergraduate years was Fine Arts A, a full-year studio course in drawing and painting that had been created by Arthur Pope. The lectures, which focused on a handful of paintings (most of which I was pleased to find hanging in the Uffizi when I visited Florence many years later), were a minor part of the course. The "labs" (as they were actually called--a sign of the prevailing attitude toward the studio and performance arts) were everything.

The first week or two we learned to recognize and reproduce colors specified by hue, intensity and neutralization. By the end of the year we were painting still-lifes and copying Rembrandt pen and wash drawings. In between, we copied Greek and Japanese line drawings, Persian designs, Botticelli's Venus and a good deal more. As a child I had loved to draw and had attended drawing and painting classes at the Museum School in Cleveland, but I knew nothing about art. Fine Arts A taught me how to see a painting or drawing--knowledge that has enriched my life immeasurably.

The only course in which I took more than occasional or cursory notes was Lynn Loomis' Mathematics 12 (now 212). Professor Loomis' lectures were models of clarity and precision. Every week I would write an amplified version of my notes in a lined notebook with hard black covers edged in crimson.

It was the purest mathematics I'd encountered up until then, and while I had no difficulty working the problems or understanding the proofs, I began to worry about the motivation. What was the point of Lebesgue's way of defining an integral? Perhaps, I thought, Lebesgue himself could enlighten me.

So I went to the big card catalogue in Widener. Sure enough, there was what I'd been looking for: Lebesgue, H., Lecons sur l'Integration, a set of lectures directed at the very question I'd been asking myself. Lebesgue approached the question historically. He began by explaining how Archimedes, in the third century B.C., had been led to invent integration. Then he explained why 17th-century mathematicians had been forced to improve Archimedes' definition and what had led their successors to invent further improvements and generalizations. Now, finally, I understood the Lebesgue integral. More important, I had discovered that you need to know the history of an idea if you really want to understand it.

With a few exceptions--I've mentioned most of them--my courses didn't take up a large fraction of my time. I didn't feel comfortable being told what to read and when to do it. I never took a music appreciation course, but I spent hours each week listening to orchestral and chamber music with score in hand. I practiced my violin, played sonatas with my classmate Noel Lee '46-'48 and played in the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra. I spent many happy hours slowly working my way through the novels of Anatole France and the philosophical essays of Henri Bergson, without expert guidance or a firm grasp of the subjunctive.

Would I be able to spend so much time in these ways today? I doubt it. Harvard undergraduates have even more academic, athletic and artistic opportunities than we did. They are smarter, harder-working and much nicer to each other than we were.

But they have less time to read and reflect and try to make the connections that we did. Not enough time is left over from course work for self-education, for reading literature or history or philosophy that hasn't been assigned, for listening to music that you won't be tested on, for strolling around art museums just to look at the pictures, for writing essays or stories or poems that no instructor will get to grade and, above all, for thinking and talking about what it all means. That can be fixed, though it won't be easy. The first step will be to recognize that there's problem.CrimsonGabriel EberDAVID R. LAYZER '46 is currently Menzel professor of astrophysics and teaches two popular Core classes, Science A-18, "Space, Time and Motion," and Science A-22, "Chance, Necessity and Order."

In any case, day-to-day relations between male and female students were constrained by geographical separation and strict parietal rules. On certain evenings, however, women could be brought as guests to Harvard dining halls, and men could be brought as guests to Radcliffe dining halls. I remember vividly my first appearance as a guest at dinner in Bertram Hall. I think I was the only male guest that evening, and my host and I made a late entrance. She escorted me past endless rows of tables where young women sat in dignified silence waiting for dinner to begin, never once glancing in our direction.

My inner-city high school hadn't been big on organized sports. I don't think it actually had any (though it did offer Latin and Greek). But I loved physical activity, and Harvard offered an undreamed-of variety of channels for it. I sampled as many as I could. I went to boxing and wrestling classes and swam in the Indoor Athletic Building, played intramural football (we had full uniforms and our own coach!), learned to play squash and rowed regularly on the Charles.

The University required first-years to take some form of regular exercise, if only calisthenics. As a group of us waited outside the I.A.B. to sign up for one of the courses that would satisfy this requirement, one member of the group--a young man of obvious refinement and sophistication-- delivered, in a charming middle-European accent, an extended jeremiad on the barbarous nature of a requirement so blatantly out of keeping with academic values and with civilized behavior in general.

A couple of weeks later I met the same classmate in English A1, a writing class open to (but not required of) students who had tested out of English A (the precursor of Expos). I had added this course on the last possible day, after steadily declining grades (49, 48 and 47 percent) on successive weekly quizzes had convinced me it would be prudent to drop introductory chemistry. I had 3,000 words to make up, but this seemed a small price to pay.

Our first assignment was to compare two or three English translations of the same passage in the Iliad. It was the most interesting assignment I'd ever had, and I still remember some of what I learned from it. Copies of the translations, along with the required and recommended books in all other undergraduate courses, occupied shelves that lined the Reading Room in Widener. There was plenty of room for them, and plenty of room to sit and read them at the long reading tables.

The instructor was the not-yet-legendary Robert Gorham Davis (who now, once again, lives and writes in Cambridge). A couple of years earlier he had urged a student to submit a story he'd written for the course to a national competition sponsored by Story magazine. The story won the competition. I was thrilled by this information because the author of the story, Norman K. Mailer '43, had lived in the suite next to mine in Eliot House.

At each class, Mr. Davis would select a piece of student writing to read and criticize. He wouldn't name the author, but a quick glance around the room often revealed a student with pink ears and an agonized expression. I assume that my classmate, the defender of civilized values, turned in more polished prose than I, for he became a well-known theatre critic.

But I did learn an important lesson: I was not destined to follow in Mailer's footsteps. My first serious effort at fiction was so inept that, rereading it a couple of weeks later, I burst out laughing.

My most enjoyable class during my two undergraduate years was Fine Arts A, a full-year studio course in drawing and painting that had been created by Arthur Pope. The lectures, which focused on a handful of paintings (most of which I was pleased to find hanging in the Uffizi when I visited Florence many years later), were a minor part of the course. The "labs" (as they were actually called--a sign of the prevailing attitude toward the studio and performance arts) were everything.

The first week or two we learned to recognize and reproduce colors specified by hue, intensity and neutralization. By the end of the year we were painting still-lifes and copying Rembrandt pen and wash drawings. In between, we copied Greek and Japanese line drawings, Persian designs, Botticelli's Venus and a good deal more. As a child I had loved to draw and had attended drawing and painting classes at the Museum School in Cleveland, but I knew nothing about art. Fine Arts A taught me how to see a painting or drawing--knowledge that has enriched my life immeasurably.

The only course in which I took more than occasional or cursory notes was Lynn Loomis' Mathematics 12 (now 212). Professor Loomis' lectures were models of clarity and precision. Every week I would write an amplified version of my notes in a lined notebook with hard black covers edged in crimson.

It was the purest mathematics I'd encountered up until then, and while I had no difficulty working the problems or understanding the proofs, I began to worry about the motivation. What was the point of Lebesgue's way of defining an integral? Perhaps, I thought, Lebesgue himself could enlighten me.

So I went to the big card catalogue in Widener. Sure enough, there was what I'd been looking for: Lebesgue, H., Lecons sur l'Integration, a set of lectures directed at the very question I'd been asking myself. Lebesgue approached the question historically. He began by explaining how Archimedes, in the third century B.C., had been led to invent integration. Then he explained why 17th-century mathematicians had been forced to improve Archimedes' definition and what had led their successors to invent further improvements and generalizations. Now, finally, I understood the Lebesgue integral. More important, I had discovered that you need to know the history of an idea if you really want to understand it.

With a few exceptions--I've mentioned most of them--my courses didn't take up a large fraction of my time. I didn't feel comfortable being told what to read and when to do it. I never took a music appreciation course, but I spent hours each week listening to orchestral and chamber music with score in hand. I practiced my violin, played sonatas with my classmate Noel Lee '46-'48 and played in the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra. I spent many happy hours slowly working my way through the novels of Anatole France and the philosophical essays of Henri Bergson, without expert guidance or a firm grasp of the subjunctive.

Would I be able to spend so much time in these ways today? I doubt it. Harvard undergraduates have even more academic, athletic and artistic opportunities than we did. They are smarter, harder-working and much nicer to each other than we were.

But they have less time to read and reflect and try to make the connections that we did. Not enough time is left over from course work for self-education, for reading literature or history or philosophy that hasn't been assigned, for listening to music that you won't be tested on, for strolling around art museums just to look at the pictures, for writing essays or stories or poems that no instructor will get to grade and, above all, for thinking and talking about what it all means. That can be fixed, though it won't be easy. The first step will be to recognize that there's problem.CrimsonGabriel EberDAVID R. LAYZER '46 is currently Menzel professor of astrophysics and teaches two popular Core classes, Science A-18, "Space, Time and Motion," and Science A-22, "Chance, Necessity and Order."