Do you know that many classes at Amherst give you the opportunity to get outside of the classroom? This semester, I’m taking a Community-Based Learning (CBL) course called Reading, Writing, and Teaching, and as part of this course, I spend 3 hours per week tutoring at a local adult basic education center. However, you don’t have to take a CBL course to get out of the classroom! In this post, let me share with you courses that have taken me out of the classroom.
1. Modern China
If you’re a future Mammoth, then you probably know Amherst requires all new students to take a first-year seminar. This class is my first-year seminar! Because my professor really wanted to introduce us to the resources at Amherst, we had two field trips over the course of the semester: one to the Archives in the library and one to the Emily Dickinson Museum. Both trips were very eye-opening because I got to see (and even work with) real historical materials. Later in the semester, my professor also invited someone she knew from Harvard who was studying Chinese video games to visit our class and give a talk, which tied in really well with our course. Before coming to Amherst, I didn’t know my classes could be so enriching!
2. The Story of the Buddha
This is probably my fourth or fifth time mentioning this class in my blog posts. It’s because I LOVE it so much! About a month and a half into the course, our class visited the nearby Peace Pagoda and got to witness what we had been talking about in real life! Instead of staring at texts that described the Buddha’s major milestones, we looked at statues and murals that depicted these scenes vividly. My featured image for this post actually comes from this field trip! The monks we met at the close-by Cambodian pagoda were super friendly and offered to take the picture for us.
Later in the semester, our class also visited the Mead Art Museum for another artifact study. I was blown away by the fact that our art museum has its own collection of Buddhist artifacts! I had a lot of fun that class working with my classmates to analyze statues and paintings.
3. Reading, Writing, and Teaching
This is the class I mentioned earlier. It’s a Community-Based Learning course, which basically means that we don’t just go to class—we also get out of the classroom and volunteer in the local communities every week. For this course, I serve as a tutor at a local basic adult education center (which I didn’t know exist before) every Wednesday morning with one of my classmates. To be honest, I worked as a freelance tutor before, so the tutoring aspect of the class wasn’t as “enlightening” as I had hoped. However, the classmate I volunteer with is a fourth-year student, so I have been learning a lot from her via our car conversations. I’m very grateful for the course for allowing me to form such a deep connection with another student, which normally don’t happen in my other classes.
Honorable Mention: Okay, one last thing. My Intro CS class last semester had a visitor giving us a talk via Zoom. While we didn’t technically get out of the classroom, the talk was definitely not a traditional classroom experience. Thanks to it, I got interested in Computational Linguistics and I’m now conducting research in this area!
I’m not sure if field trips are common in college courses, but I’m certainly surprised that so many of my courses allow me to do things that aren’t just sitting in classrooms and talking about the world in a bubble. Come to Amherst and I promise you’ll be surprised by the quality of classes here. If you’re a visiting student, hope to see you in the next few days. If you cannot visit, I’m always open to answering your questions at thuhoang28@amherst.edu. Just shoot me an email—I’d love to answer your questions!