A student who took my composition course last year drops by my office hours and wants to buy me a cup of coffee. This is a fringe benefit of being a teacher--continued relationships with students, people yelling a greeting to you across campus. In fact, the most accurate indicator of students' feelings is not course evaluations, but whether they admit to recognizing you after the grades have been turned in.
We walk over to the Student Union, buy drinks and find a place to sit outside. I ask him about his classes, and he recites a litany of political science, English, drama, and comparative literature courses.
A political science major, he wants to work in the foreign service, and over the summer, he did an internship with his congressional representative. He tells me about the requirements of each course, and I give advice on how to tackle the various papers. He then says, "Oh, and I'm taking tractor driving."
I do the requisite double take.
He explains, "I vowed that I wasn't going to leave Davis without having driven a tractor."
Since this is his last year, it was time to act. Once a week he joins 40 or so others in a South Davis field to learn the intricacies of tractors. The class is offered only in the fall and spring. In the winter, the field is too muddy.
We talk more about this course than all the others, and it's clear to me that it also may be more important to this future foreign service diplomat than all the others. He certainly enjoys it the most and is less jaded about it. His literature class he has dismissed with a wave of his hand and the comment, "Oh, you know how those go." Climbing on the tractor, however, is learning purely for the joy of learning. With an element of goofiness added. It won't go on his resume, and it won't impress foreign diplomats, but it gives him a deep personal satisfaction.
"You should think about taking it," he urges as we walk back to my office. "Or at least come down and watch."
I might. Either way, I like to picture him packing away his textbooks on Friday afternoons, leaving the main campus and hurrying south, as he goes, reviewing in his head the gear patterns of the huge machine, his hands involuntarily flexing at the thought of steering that tractor back and forth across the dirt.
-- Joseph Mills, Ph.D. '98
