Spencer Brownstein ‘18

Last spring, as I perused the newly updated course list planning out my next semester, one course in particular jumped off the screen and caught my eye. Professor Matt Burgess’s How to Be a Person in the World immediately caused a stir on campus. Almost every English major I know, and many friends outside the department, all had the same question: “What’s up with this How to Be a Person class?”

Now, many months and a fifty-person-long waitlist later, I am one of the fifteen lucky students who can begin answering that question.

Named after an Ask Polly book, How to Be a Person in the World is Professor Burgess’s brainchild. His plan was to more actively foster student engagement in class by giving them “agency over what we’re talking about.” In order to do this, Professor Burgess had each of us submit one question that we have about being a person in the world at the end of last May. He then used all of our submissions to develop the syllabus as a means of answering each individual question. “It felt like a fun way for everyone to feel empowered and to feel like they have a stake in this sort of classroom experience,” he says.

So far, this class has been a wild ride, changing greatly from week to week as we move through each question. Not only do the questions change, but the ways we address them must change, too.

When talking about grief, Professor Burgess brought in Macalester’s grief counselors to chat with us. When talking about the role competition plays in our lives, we played a game of Mafia, an old school party game based on community teamwork and deception. When talking about the ineffability of language, we used the DeWitt Wallace Library’s new Idea Lab to make 3D models of recent dreams.

Professor Burgess admits that much of the planning for this course “has been done on the fly” in order to best find the answers each student is really looking for based on individual presentations and the general flow of previous classes.  Professor Burgess says of this method, “we’re gonna strike out sometimes,” but this is the very essence of the course. Professor Burgess wants to foster a space in class where “we’re all comfortable taking chances, and potentially failing” while we can be “confident in our doubt and our questioning and the risks we’re taking.”

It is important to remember that How to Be a Person in the World is a creative writing course: we all must write a short story related to our individual questions. Of course, we may not be able to concretely answer our questions, but this is not the biggest take away Professor Burgess hopes we have.  Mostly, he wants us to learn about “the importance of leading a creative life,” and how to render our big questions in meaningful and productive ways.

Professor Burgess plans to continue teaching How to Be a Person in the World in the future. Are you a student interested in self-interrogation? Do you have questions about the nature of the world and your place in it? Are you interested in trying, and failing, and trying again to find the answers to these questions? If so, keep your eye out when new course lists are posted, and try to find the answers you seek!