Two choices this week: EITHER

Write your take on the Thanksgiving prompt from last week, explaining the value of your education to someone who just doesn’t get it;

OR

‘Tis the season . . . for college admissions, and prospective students are flooding the campus. 

Just a couple of years ago you too were prospectives, trekking round the country or the world to scout out colleges. Now you are here, all but settled in a major, contemplating the future. Do things look different on this side of the wall between high school and college?

In his poem “Tintern Abbey,” William Wordsworth has a thought or two on the sometimes dramatic shift from adolescence to adulthood:

  –I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love. . .
                    –That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. . . other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense.

So, the blog prompt (you were wondering if I’d ever get there?):

How has your perspective changed since you were a prospective student? How has it stayed the same? Write a reflection that captures your shifting perspective on Wooster, college, texts, or even on life in general. Focus your post very specifically—establish one central, defining place, issue, event, text etc.—but your post should also (like a good close reading) have wider resonance, to capture more global shifts in your worldview

Possible topics, if the broadness of the prompt leaves you at a loss:

The College of Wooster from the outside (then) and inside (now)
Election season: perspectives in high school versus college
Fairy tales:  early listening, current reading
An iconic song, then and now
. . .etcetera.

Have fun! No length restrictions this week.