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be refreshing, I imagine that being with virtually the same group
of people day-in and day-out for three years can limit a student’s
growth. The “nerdy” student will most likely maintain that identity
throughout his/her years, whereas the “class clown” will maintain
that identity, and the “slackers” will maintain those identities. By
remaining in the same social environment, students do not realize
that they can morph their academic identities. American students
have this privilege and are unaware as to what a privilege it actually
is. As a student, I enjoyed the anonymity of large lecture halls full
of students I had never seen before: I did not feel the pressure to
speak up—I simply listened to an engineering student’s perspective
on anthropology, or a music student’s take on philosophy. In my
small Honors English seminars (6-15 students), I enjoyed taking a
dominant role because I knew the other Honors English students
and could have lively debates with them. In non-Honors English
seminars (30-40 students) I would contribute actively, but would
take a backseat to other voices I knew I would only hear in this
classroom—the Human Rights major whose take on Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness seemed much more raw than mine, the aspiring
med-student whose ideas on memory and rape in Dorothy Allison’s
Bastard Out of Carolina focused on the physicality of the concepts,
on bodily effects, on the science of things. These environments
allowed me to be a student in a variety of settings, and in a variety
of ways—teaching me to talk and listen at varying levels, and
teaching me to be a different “Krisela” in certain moments. It was
liberating; I worry that the Albanian student—often shuffling from
class-to-class in a manner similar to high school, might not get
this fresh sense of change. I worry that the Albanian student’s
identity might remain fixed; stagnant. I worry that he/she might
not fully develop his/her individuality, separate from his/her best
friends and away from his/her social clique.
Of course, I could continue endlessly with the minutiae of how
Albanian and American universities differ: American universities
have access to greater funds (partially because their prices of
attendance are skyrocketing) and therefore are able to provide
their students with the latest technologies in the classroom—
Smartboards, projectors, survey clickers, Wi-Fi access everywhere,
modern buildings and furnishings, access to online databases for
research, access to a student gym, access to extracurricular student
groups, access to a student meal-plan, access to fixed schedules
and information online (professors can upload syllabi and small
packets of copyright-approved material to an online system, where
students enrolled in each class can easily obtain them at any time),
etc. Albanian public universities have raised their costs, but they
are still manageable (and they have to be, given that there is no
system for obtaining fair and fixed-rate student loans). They also
rely on an emerging economy for funding. That said, Albanian public
institutions of higher education do not have the economic luxury to
consistently provide the aforementioned accommodations.