Awards

The sophomore distinction in history award is given to the most outstanding history student in the grade.

“A college professor wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times recently, complaining about students who “weren’t doing what it takes to learn.” Instead, the professor reported students mute in class discussion, failing to complete assignments, not showing up for meetings to discuss their research papers, and generally disengaged from the whole project of learning. Poor fellow hasn’t had in class the tenth-grade history award winner!

Now, the winner does the usual things engaged students do: she completes homework, engages in class discussion, prepares effectively for tests. But the most remarkable proof of her excellence is her incorporation of lessons learned into her permanent vocabulary. She doesn’t take a test and then delete the file. On a test in May, she wrote about nationalism’s “imagined community,” a concept we first learned in November and hadn’t referred to in weeks—-but she saw an opportunity to wield it to great effect. And her ability to use a lesson taught in one context and apply it to another proves a nimble vitality of mind: in discussing Vaclav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless” and his thesis about individuals’ complicity in going along and thus sustaining the oppressive Communist system in Czechoslovakia, she compared it to Philip Zimbardo’s demonstration—in a totally different context—of how good people’s passive indifference and diffusion of responsibility can lead to evil.

For her energy, good cheer, and commitment to highly effective, engaged learning, the history department is happy to award this distinction to Lauren Liu.”