A Break from the Block

After 18 blocks at Colorado College, I decided to spend this semester in Australia doing quite the opposite. As I write this, I am about nine weeks into my studies at the University of Sydney. While finishing up all of my mid-semester essays and assignments, I thought I would take a step back and reflect on just how different class can be when it’s not stuffed into three and a half weeks. 

Don’t get me wrong—I treasure the block plan and all it has to offer. That said, the semester plan grass does look a lot greener when I’m reading hundreds of pages each week on the block plan. The last two months have just been so inextricably different in both good and bad ways that I think it is worth taking a minute to unpack my experiences outside of the block plan bubble. 

The University of Sydney is a public university in the heart of the city. It takes a solid 20 minutes to speed walk from one end of campus to the other, if you don’t get stuck at any of the intersections for too long. There are 59,000 undergraduates and graduates enrolled, they use a normal semester plan, and most students commute to class rather than live on campus. So, it’s just slightly different from what I’m used to at CC. 

My first week of classes was baffling. They don’t do anything?? We read over every page of every syllabus, went through all of our assignments, and talked schedules. I stumbled out of the lecture hall with nothing to do, and then I had a full week before the next class to do all that nothing. 

Over the next few weeks though, things picked up, and at about the time that I would normally be packing up for a block break trip, I started to feel like I really had a grip on each of my classes. I drew out a huge grid so that I could visualize my schedule between my four classes, and I used it to try to space out my work as well as superimpose my travel plans and social life. That type of control over my schedule is something that I have never felt at CC. At CC, I feel like as soon as I start to grasp how to do the work for a certain class, the block ends. I am left in a perpetual cycle of readjustment, learning and relearning how to exist in one space after another. Here, though, I did all that adjusting in the beginning of the semester and had three months left to experience the life I had built around my classes. 

Now, there is a lot of value to the adjustment crash course that CC provides. I think it made my entire abroad experience a little less daunting. I wasn’t so afraid to go to a new school, to meet new people, or to start new classes because I had gone through that kind of thing 18 times already. On the block plan, you learn how to adapt to new environments, put yourself out there, and make new friends. In the process of learning all of this, though, you don’t get the chance to establish a balance between hard work and enjoying your life. But hey, maybe that’s what your twenties are for. 

Another interesting element that shifts when moving from the block plan to the semester plan is how you relate your classes to each other in your head and which material your brain decides to stir into your current lecture or reading. At CC, I always learned material in my current class through the lens of my last. When I took Mathematical Modelling in Biology after Neuroscience, for example, I created a model for receptors in memory consolidation. When I took Biology of Animals after Introduction to Psychology: Bases of Behavior, my bio paper was on the behavior of octopuses. This creates some really unexpected but rich mashups. On the semester plan, instead of applying a full course’s worth of material, you learn everything simultaneously, allowing different ideas to grow together in an interdisciplinary way. As questions come up in one class, I analyze them through the lenses of my other classes, resulting in a well-rounded feedback loop that binds all of my interests together. Right now, I am learning about birds in my biology class, working with birds in my internship, thinking about how I interact with birds in my cultural studies class, and experimenting with different ways of portraying birds in my creative writing class. One topic that wasn’t necessarily relevant to all of my classes managed to permeate all of them. This facilitated really productive learning and allowed each discipline to inform the others. I can only imagine how this experience must develop from semester to semester as entire course-loads of information are added. 

Both formats represent modes of information synthesis that might be encountered in a career setting. Moving from one job to the next, you might be taking a set of knowledge in its entirety and applying it to your new position. On the other hand, you could be working on multiple projects at once, gaining insight from the ways that they interact and using that to improve each of them simultaneously. 

Another important question to ask about the block plan is whether our learning and retention is affected by our courses being reduced to three and a half weeks. In my neuroscience course, my professors liked to freak us out by joking that only after three and a half weeks would your brain would start to move information to long-term memory. Of course, that is not true and learning happens differently for everyone. As far as I can tell, there is no definitive research on whether learning something over a shorter or longer period is better for long-term retention. One study I found looked at people who were fast and slow learners. The researchers measured how much information participants could retain if they learned the same amount over different lengths of time, but they found no differences between the two groups (Gentile, Monaco, Iheozor-Ejiofor, & Ogbonaya, 1982). 

Sleep is a factor that has been heavily researched of how quickly or slowly people learn something. Over an entire semester, you sleep more often. You might have seven nights of sleep after a single lecture compared to just one on the block plan. Many studies (Fischer, Drosopoulos, Tsen, & Born, 2006; Peigneux, Laureys, Delbeuck, & Maquet, 2001; Stickgold, Hobson, Fosse, & Fosse, 2001) show that sleep plays a major role in memory consolidation. However, none of these studies examine whether more nights of sleep will help you learn something even more effectively, but I figure that the more nights you have after learning a concept, the better chance there is that one of them will be a night consisting of high quality sleep. So, this research does not point to the block plan as being worse for learning, but it does suggest that on either schedule, one of the best things we can do for our learning is just to try to get a good night’s sleep.

It’s also important to consider the stress. It’s a different beast on each schedule. During the semester it is omnipresent, following you around like Eeyore’s personal storm cloud. Even during mid-semester break, you have assignments waiting for you when you get back—the due dates are already marked on your calendar. But isn’t that still the case on the block plan? You have extracurricular commitments that bleed into your breaks, applications that you cram into your free time. And on top of that, I think to some degree we loosen our stress management during the block because we know that the block break is coming. Mindfulness and balance can seem fruitless during those three and a half weeks, but looking at it from a macro level, all eight blocks together make up a large chunk of our lives. Without making an effort to cope, this constant tension and release of stress can really build up. 

Something that the block plan definitely does have going for it is the opportunity for field trips. My best memories at CC have been multi-day camping trips and weeks at the Baca campus where I can immerse myself completely in the learning. In my classes here in Sydney, field trips involve missing other classes and having to catch up later, navigating public transportation, and being taught by exhausted TAs. There is also no flexibility; when we were doing an outdoor practical and it rained, we put on our raincoats and made subpar field observations anyway. At CC, we would have just moved it to the next nine-12 time slot that we had scheduled and done something inside that day. 

Now I’ll talk about what many of us consider the main draw of the block plan: uninterrupted focus, and from that, enhanced learning. With only one class to worry about, CC boasts that its students can become completely immersed in one subject. For me, this benefit might be the one that has held up the most so far. When I have a huge research paper or presentation due (or both!) during fourth week, I take a lot of comfort in the fact that this is all I have to worry about for the time being. Even if I have multiple assignments due for my block, usually once I finish one, the other one is based on similar content and is slightly easier to work through. Despite this, I have noticed my focus drifting away from my class in some of my most recent blocks. While I was very excited about ornithology, I would find myself picking up books and watching documentaries about completely different topics. Once I moved onto my statistics block, all I wanted to read about was ornithology. It seemed that no matter what I tried to get my brain to focus on, and no matter how interested I was in it, I was still craving supplemental learning. But, once I started the semester plan and had to start negotiating how much mental energy I could dedicate to three different classes, I really missed the focus I was able to achieve on the block plan. 

Here, we can turn to Isabell Stengers’ concept of pharmakon (drawing on the work of Plato). This refers to “a drug or quality that can act as a poison or a remedy,” based on the idea that “cures become curses in different moments and different moods.” Simplified, it means that almost anything can be good in moderation, and bad in excess. This could be a helpful way of thinking about focus and distraction. It can be disorienting to have too little focus and an excess of distractions. This is the extreme that you are closest to on the semester plan–with too many clubs or lab classes, you can start to feel out of control. But on the block plan, you are nearing a different extreme: that of too few enriching distractions and an excess of focus on one subject. This can also be overwhelming and create “block-plan tunnel vision,” which is why it is so nice to get off campus on the weekends or go to a cafe in town to study. Our coping mechanisms at CC are ways to combat homogeny and give our minds the variable enrichment they need. With an awareness of what you’re up against, it may be possible to have a balanced lifestyle on either the semester or the block plan. That lifestyle will just be achieved in different ways.

Finally, I think the block plan teaches us active learning. On the semester plan, it’s been easy for me to tune out during a lecture, maybe even skip one, because I know I can just catch up on the material later. All the lectures are recorded, so I feel like I have a safety net that I can fall back on when I have to study for finals. Having that resource seemed like a good thing at first, but I found that it encourages students to tune out when they could be doing their most valuable learning right there with the professor or TA. At CC, the proximity of our assessments keeps us on the edge of our seats, trying to soak up as much as possible during each lecture. My mindset is “I’ll need to know this really well for the test in a few days, so might as well do my best to understand completely it right now.” I never completely step out of that test mindset during the block, so I’m always asking those extra clarifying questions during class, rather than telling myself that I’ll figure it out later.

Thinking ahead to life with a full-time job, having experienced the block plan will help me adapt to a new environment or pick up a new skill set quickly, yet will also help me know when to take a break. It’s teaching students now what the risks are of becoming too absorbed in one thing, as well as what our brain signals feel like when we need a break. This could help us pursue highly demanding jobs with long hours while still keeping our mental health in check.

Overall, it seems to me that neither schedule is clearly better than the other, but the block plan isn’t a fluke, and you didn’t choose CC for nothing. This random idea that we tried out might not be groundbreakingly perfect, but it doesn’t seem to be putting us at any type of disadvantage going into grad school or the job market. If anything, it is a unique experience that will allow us to bring a different perspective to wherever we go after CC. 

Of course, I am just one data point at both schools, and experiences vary drastically both from one person to the next and from one school to the next. It is a worthwhile thought experiment, though, to take something that you’re accustomed to, like the block plan, and examine how radically it has shaped you as a person and how it situates you as you move into your future experiences. And, we’ll see how I feel come finals week. 

Mediocre Issue | November 2019

44th and Lowell

Situated on 44th Avenue and Lowell Boulevard across the street from a Safeway gas station and next to an orthodontist’s office in Denver is a one-story grey building. Around the corner, there’s a mural of a man hidden on the wall adjacent to a comically small and ridiculously-difficult-to-navigate parking lot. In the winter, the mural is the only visible color in the area. Pink plumes painted in delicate strokes frame the outline of the head, while various hues of blue, purple, and orange detail the rest of the depicted traditional dress, which pays homage to the Osage Nation of the Midwest. The man depicted on the mural is alone, seated with no background or other people. He is totally on his own.  

Around the corner from the mural is a glass door with three purple handprints and the words “Tocabe: An American Indian Eatery” printed below. Inside, the restaurant is reminiscent of a Chipotle, with large overhead menus detailing various plate options such as Indian Tacos, Melting Pot Salads, Stuffed Fry Bread, and Medicine Wheel Nachos. Posu Bowls of Wild Rice or Red Quinoa are also listed alongside Berry Braised Bison Ribs and Wojapi cups. The fare tells a story, speaking to both the yield of the land and the traumatic and painful history of the West. 

Tocabe first opened its doors to the public in 2008, when owners Matt Chandra and Ben Jacobs of the Osage Nation decided to test out a more permanent home for their recipes, which had previously won multiple awards at the National Indian Taco Championship in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. Now, they operate two restaurants in the Denver metro area that are committed to their vision of embracing “the traditions of American Indian Cuisine and ingredients by building community through food.” In creating Tocabe, Chandra and Jacobs sought to create a contemporary space for traditional Native American cuisine, and were conscious in their decision to cultivate an atmosphere that is open, warm, and unapologetically connected to Native cultural elements. 

With over 560 different federally recognized and hundreds more unrecognized Native American tribes in the United States, it’s difficult to conceptualize how “An American Indian Eatery” should manifest itself in today’s food scene. The sheer diversity of Native groups with their distinct ingredients and cuisines makes representation complicated, which is why Chandra and Jacobs emphasize that their recipes should be understood as merely an introduction to North American Native cuisine. To convey this, Tocabe incorporates various ingredients and flavors that appear across Native cultures.

Fry bread, for example, is a staple in many Native tribes throughout North America and can be made a variety of ways ranging from with or without lard to based in yeast and cornmeal or all-purpose flour and baking powder. "Fry bread is an easy introduction," Chandra says, also explaining that "it's universal," which is why the restaurant chooses to highlight it. Using the fry bread as the base, Tocabe then builds upon the more complex flavor palettes of specific tribes, offering fry bread options with pinto beans and green chile or sweet corn, radish, poblano, and green onion on top. All of the ingredients are trademark “Made by American Indian,” a certification bestowed by the Intertribal Agricultural Council that identifies food products made by federally recognized tribes. 

Tocabe continues to explore ways that food can advance the dialogue surrounding the treatment of Native cultures in the United States. Chandra and Jacobs are purposeful in their planning of every aspect of the restaurant, not just the menu. Their design choices are especially meant to create space for and highlight indigenous iconography in everyday American pop culture. Outside, the mural exalts the archetype of an Osage man, while inside, the walls are decorated with framed works by Kiowa-Choctaw filmmaker, graphic designer, and writer Steven Paul Judd. Judd describes his work as “Native pop art” because it transforms contemporary US cultural icons by re-envisioning them through a Native lens. He attributes the creation of this style to his childhood, during which he often looked for reflections of Native culture in mass media. In an interview with Ron Castro of the Arkansas CW, he explained that “In popular culture, I didn’t really see the representation of myself that I wanted,” promising his childhood self that he would make consumable media that reflects Native traditions and values. He seeks to create a space for Natives in the world of mass media, and he now deconstructs icons such as Dr. Seuss’s Fox with Socks, replacing him with Dr. Sioux’s Fox with Mocs. 

Judd’s artwork operates as a means of resistance against white supremacy and Native erasure in the same way that Tocabe itself is revolutionary for fostering a space for Native cuisine in Denver’s food culture. In a city where the emergence of new restaurants is often synonymous with gentrification and the continued oppression of low-income residents of color, Tocabe strives to steer Denver’s culinary scene in a more representational and equitable direction. The current mainstream and whitewashed understanding of the American West perpetuates the erasure of indigenous people by promoting images of white cowboys in a pastoral West that derives a particular holiness from being uninhabited and untouched. Tocabe is flipping that narrative, reminding clients that the preservation of the landscapes of the West has only been made possible by Native management of the land. Before white people began committing genocide and mass murder against indigenous people, the relationship that existed between Native groups and the land was one built on mutual respect and dependence.

Tocabe upholds this relationship in its vision as a restaurant. Chandra and Jacobs boast an important goal: according to their website, they are striving to become “the Industry Standard of American Indian Cuisine by offering the highest quality food, service and atmosphere at an affordable price that does not compromise the integrity of the product, staff, culture, and community.” Tocabe dares to create a restaurant atmosphere and mission that marries the land, its yield, its people, and its history. 

Operating a restaurant like Tocabe is no easy feat: Chandra and Jacobs are dedicated to amplifying voices that have long been marginalized at the expense of US expansionism and white supremacy. As the only Native American restaurant in metro Denver and one of only a handful located within the United States, Tocabe is faced with the unique challenge of simultaneously reconciling the bloody and violent history of the US while elevating the recipes and narratives that have been stifled over centuries of colonization. The restaurant is a vessel that brings Native American cuisine to a wider audience in a new and innovative way. 

People from all over the country come to Denver to indulge in shredded bison with Chile beans, lettuce, cheese, tomatoes, and red onions topped with an Osage Hominy salsa, hot green chiles, and the Ancho Chipotle sauce—but the restaurant is about more than just its menu. Tocabe is a new manifestation of resistance to colonialism and white supremacy that honors the Native Americans who have suffered for centuries in the United States. Intergenerational trauma has resulted in the inheritance of injustice, which the restaurant is working to reconcile through both food and space by providing a platform for cuisine that white settlers have attempted to erase. The backs of the employee uniforms read, “My heroes have always made fry bread.” Tocabe honors these heroes through food, bringing their revolutionary, unapologetic dedication to Native representation to a new audience.

 Mediocre Issue | November 2019