Guest Post: Third Student Op-Ed

As every Oxford Tradition participant knows, choosing a major and minor is full of indecision as you wade through the overwhelming number of options, each equally enticing. Thursday’s “Weekday Weekender” offered a day to explore two new courses for an hour each and get a taste for what fellow students are experiencing on a daily basis. The entire day was about plunging head first into new experiences. In Literature and Psychology, the class was immersed in ideas of economic, social, and racial oppression during discussions about writings by Franz Fanon.  We listened to a poem in Creole dialect that was set to music and that spoke of the double consciousness of the racially oppressed. The other incredible part of the day was the two hours I spent weeding, composting, and harvesting in an urban community garden. This was just one of many community service options for the afternoon and it left me and my peers feeling rewarded after hard work in the hot sun, which was a refreshing change from the academic portion of the day. After learning about a plethora of crops and getting to take home a head of lettuce and rainbow chard, working in the garden shed as much light on a new subject as the Weekday Weekender.