All-college Seminar

Last night it would have been more appropriate for me to post about the all-college seminar, but for some random reason I published my personal vocabulary list. It was late.
The seminar was fun. I enjoyed it much more than my freshman seminar, but it’s not fair to my peers to compare them. The all-college seminar was based on Montaigne’s essay “Of Friendship.” Everyone interested in participating in the all-college seminar could grab a copy of it in the coffee shop and sign up with the Student Committee on Instruction. The sign up is so they can gauge how many rooms they will need, not because they want to be exclusive. Anyway, everyone who’s signed up is assigned a room in McDowell Great Hall, and the numbers were kept between ten and fifteen for each room. In mine, I had three tutors, four upperclassmen, and six freshmen including myself. Having tutors who are there to participate on the same level as students and having students with more seminar experience than the freshmen made for a very good conversation.
We discussed everything from Montaigne’s terminologies regarding the perfect friendship he described, to our opinions on his perception of friendship; from the distinction between choosing a friend and being brought by some greater power into the ultimate relationship, to the spiritual aspect of friendship; from the elusive qualities of the human will, to question whether we should (or want to) strive for the perfect friendship he describes. There’s so much more in between. I didn’t gain more questions from this seminar. I came out feeling, in a word, enriched.
One of the aspects of the Program I’m enjoying so much is that I’m being taught to glean beauty and truth and, at least, questions from authors with whom I’m not always expected or forced to agree. Montaigne raised some good points in his essay, but truly what I learned was found in the conversation.