A Few Serious and Not-So-Serious Things I Did as an Oliner

In four years at Olin, I did the following:

Reflections on Semester 4: French Literature

This semester, I took a French class at Wellesley for AHS! The class was called Fictions of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century France. It ended up being a really small class (5 students!), and we covered a really wide range of material, from medical reports to fairy tales. We also wrote, illustrated, and bound our own children's books.

The Art of a Book

My French class this semester is about literature and 19th century childhood in France. As a project, each of us is writing, illustrating, and binding a children's book!

This past Tuesday, we spent some time in Wellesley's Book Arts Lab (yes, this exists!) to learn about how we're going to bind our books and to study different types of printing.

 We're going to accordion fold our books, so we talked about how to format the documents we type, and then we started talking about binding. Our books will be accordion folded. Using an accordion fold allows the book to be read like a normal book, but it also allows us to pull out the pages so that they can all be seen at once. We'll all have multiple sheets that will need to be attached, and that's done with a type of Japanese tissue paper that has the right kinds of strength and durability. We practiced folding and attaching sheets using colorful pieces of paper! We also got to use some really interesting tools, like bone folders.

A yellow sheet and a pink sheet attached with a strip of tissue paper. That little bag is basically a paperweight, but evidently it's standard in book binding. The bone folder is to the left of the scissors.

We talked about different types of printing and looked at some examples of each, but the best part of our trip to the Book Arts Lab was printing a poster on a press! One of the first works we read was Jean Jacques Rousseau's Emile, in which Rousseau repeatedly manipulates his student so that the student will learn, so we chose to print "Keep calm and manipulate Emile" on our poster.
This phrase has five Es in it, which is a lot for something like this where the font should be large. This was one of the only large types that had five Es. Each letter is called a sort, and with most of the other types, we would have been out of sorts. (That's the origin of that phrase!)

The inked type for our poster!

The press we were using was a 20th century press, so it had one motorized part. This was a really fascinating machine, and it was so much fun to figure out how various bits of it work!

All photos are by Becca, who has been awesome in working with us on this project. In the picture is Katherine, who runs the Book Arts Lab.

Do-Learn at Olin and French Philosophy

Yesterday, for my French class at Wellesley, I read an excerpt of a book called Le Maître Ignorant  by Ranciere, and the excerpt focused on a French professor, Jacotot, who, after the restoration of the monarchy in France, moved to the Netherlands and taught there. However, he spoke no Dutch, and his students spoke no French. Nevertheless, he was able to teach French literature by giving the students a bilingual copy of a book and having them read it and write about it. The essay then goes on to analyse the role of teachers in various manners of teaching, and it argues that explaining material should not be part of a teacher's role.

I found this reading particularly interesting because it's closely related to my experience at Olin. Some phrases that people use to describe the learning experience at Olin are Do-Learn, Just-in-Time, and project-based. These all imply a greater focus on learning from trying something than on a lecture model. Do-Learn is what it sounds like: learning from doing. Just-in-Time generally means that students are working on some project, and when they reach a point where they need information or a skill they don't have, then they learn it. Project-based is a term we usually use to contrast our classes with problem set courses, and it implies that the course is organized around the projects, not just theory. In reality, most Olin classes involve some amount of lecture or explanation on the part of teachers and/or NINJAs, but it's often less than in the vast majority of engineering, math, and science courses elsewhere.