College Advice from Shakespeare and Me

In the weeks (alright, months) before my son’s departure for college, I found myself giving him bits of advice. I am not the only one. It was as if everyone had the need to pack his bags.

Some of us know what we’re talking about. Some of us are out of date. Some of us are spouting platitudes and clichés. Some of us are telling him what he already knows. Then there is the question of whether this kind of advice is useful at all.

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, we also have college advice. Polonius, the king’s most trusted advisor, delivers a long speech of advice to his son, Laertes. While some of the advice seems reasonable and even classic, there is an issue with this scene. Polonius is a problematic character. He is closely allied with the villain of the play. He likes to spy on the younger people. He even sends a servant to secretly watch over his son while he is at school! Even his son, prior to hearing the advice, is disappointed that he didn’t leave before his father had a chance to talk to him again. Polonius is sometimes called a melding windbag.

Like the advice my son has received, much of what Polonius tells his son is common sense. In fact, much of it was trite even in Shakespeare’s time. Does that mean that the advice is less worthy? Polonius is a problematic character whom Hamlet despises. Do the words change their meaning when they come from such a person?

I do not want to be Polonius. I don’t want my child to roll his eyes when I give him advice about college. Which leads us to the question of the worth of unsought advice. Sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know. I can think of several examples where someone has guided me without my request and it has been critically important.

So how do we help our children navigate college without becoming intrusive meddlers or long-winded old fools? Can we share some important wisdom without the eye rolls?

Polonius starts his speech by giving his son his “blessing” (Hamlet 1.3.56) and that may be a good start. Framing our advice as a form of sharing our love and not an attempt to maintain our control may open the listening door a little crack.

One of Polonius’s first pieces of advice is “give thy thoughts no tongue,/Nor any unproportioned thought his act” (Hamlet 1.3.58-59). Listening first is a good idea. In college, students encounter new people with backgrounds different than their own. Their prejudices cannot help but show. Telling our children to slow down and think as they listen is a skill with which I continue to struggle. Listen, then think, then think again and only then speak. This is the best way to prevent athlete’s tongue.

Relationships are key in college. Learning to build bonds and reach out to peers, professors, and others is what may make or break a college experience. Polonius notes this, too:  “Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,/ Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel” (Hamlet 1.3.61-62). Yes, reach out to your roommate, kids on your floor and in your classes and activities. Go further; connect to your professors, grad students, advisors, and those all important administrative assistants, administrators, RAs, and people behind desks or counters. Treat people well and take care of them!

Polonius says, in his own way, that clothes make the man  (Hamlet 1.3.71). I am not sure I agree that our kids need to focus on what they wear that much. However, I am sending my son to a university that is often called J Crew U.

Many of us have tried to find borrowed items or to get someone to pay back a loan. Polonius’s platitude of, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” (Hamlet 1.3.74) may be common sense, but that doesn’t diminish its truth.

Polonius does not tell Laertes to be a self-starter. He doesn’t tell him to be proactive and make things happen, rather than passively waiting for them to occur. That was one of my most important pieces of advice to my children.

Laertes was an aristocrat and probably wasn’t real concerned about his grades. I want my children to read the syllabus and put the deadlines in their calendars and then pay attention to them!

Eating well, being able to do laundry and basic cleaning, managing time and money seem like the topics that will elicit those eye rolls. I couldn’t help myself. The Polonius in me made me include them here.

Polonius’s most famous piece of advice, and one of Shakespeare’s most often cited quotations is, “This above all: to thine own self be true, /And it must follow, as the night the day, /Thou canst not then be false to any man” (Hamlet 1.3.77-79). What does this mean to eighteen-year-olds? Do they know themselves this well? Can they be true to shifting values, desires, and majors? They try on personas like clothing (Oh, now I get it). That may be one of the most important tasks in college: to figure out who you are, what you love, how you learn, and how to make your way in the world independently.

 

Perhaps that means finding other sources of advice. Cultivating a support network of people whose advice you trust is invaluable at any age. Give those trusted people permission to tap you on the shoulder and say the things that must be said. Be that kind of person for others. Have a set of people, both peers and others, who will reach over and give you a hand when you have fallen – even if you don’t know you have fallen.

And, of course, call or text or email home. Your parents miss you. Call your father. Often.  

  

Work Cited:
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006. Print.

Making Star Trek Great Again

In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the premiere of Star Trek, I would like to answer the question that I have been asked 6342 times since July 21; what did you think of the new movie? Here is my answer:

The second J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie, Into Darkness, was a disappointment. It felt like Star Trek window dressing rather than a real journey.

So my expectations for this year’s movie, on the occasion of Star Trek’s fiftieth anniversary, were low. It was good that Simon Pegg was writing, but the previews featured lots of action and little that felt like Trek. And motorcycles? I was not optimistic.

I saw the movie the day before the official opening. I was pleasantly surprised and pleased. This is by far the best of the three rebooted Star Trek films. This film gets back to what makes Trek great. It affirms the values and ideas that are at Trek’s core. It is not perfect, but it is far better than its predecessor and the first reboot, Star Trek 2009(Star Trek XI).

Warning: There are spoilers beyond this point. I am going to discuss the film as if you have seen it, read about it, or are otherwise knowledgeable about its plot, characters, themes, and issues. If you haven’t seen the film and don’t want to learn specific details, stop here and read this later.

This is an exploration film. This is a film that embraces the reality of a long-term deep space mission and the idea (and ideal) of boldly going where no one has gone before. This is a film that clearly states that, even though there are enemies, bad guys, and people who would do us harm, we must continue to be our best selves and live by our highest ideals. In this movie (unlike in the prior two), our heroes go high even when the villains go low.

This film celebrates the Vulcan concept of I.D.I.C: Infinite diversity in infinite combinations. The fact that the crew of the Enterprise, Starfleet, and the Federation represent a wide variety of ethnicities, species, and differences living in harmony is an affirmation of Gene Roddenberry’s vision. We don’t point out this diversity. It is not special. We see Sulu’s husband and daughter, but there isn’t a moment of pause to make a statement. The statement is made by the simplicity and lack of attention. It isn’t a big deal – it is our future reality.  

Jaylah, our guest character, is never a romantic or sexual figure. She is a tinkerer and fighter. The role could have been male and the story would work, but it was not done that way and I applaud the production team for this choice. Uhura and several other female characters are featured in a way that we have not seen in prior films as well. The film barely passes the Bechtel test, but it certainly acknowledges its spirit. I would have loved if the main villain had been female. That would have worked, too.

The plot is convoluted and sometimes difficult to follow, even for a seasoned Trek fan.  However, it is easy to follow the pairs of characters as they work to find each other when stranded on the planet. It is the technical details that trip us up: who is Krall? Where did he come from? How does he control his swarm of small ships? Why has he been on this planet for so long? Why is the object that Kirk was trying to give as a peace token so important to him? What is that object and what is its power? We do get answers to most of these, but they come very late and very quickly and it took me a while to sort them out. However, unlike the prior two films, the story eventually makes sense and there is no magic blood or super red matter weapon short cut plot device to make things work. The plot functions, but the gears grind at times.

Ultimately, Star Trek Beyond is a fight between those who would embrace modernity, diversity, exploration, and science and those who look nostalgically at a violent and provincial past. It is a battle against a villain who insists that the struggle against enemies, even if we have to invent them, is what makes us powerful and great. It is about what happens to people when their highest value is fear of the enemy. Those who follow such fear mongering leaders are like the mindless worker bees who swarm the Enterprise and destroy it. Krall’s transformation makes a visual statement: fear disfigures us, and hate corrupts us; they turn us from human beings into monsters. No statement could be more true to Star Trek.

Yes, the film was full of wonderful references to past Treks. There were little buried treasures for us Trekkers: the reference to Adonis’s “giant green space hand” which captures the ship in the original series, the idea that the missions are becoming “episodic,” and several wonderful acknowledgments of the most recent television series: Enterprise.

I must admit getting a little choked up at the lovely tribute to Leonard Nimoy through the photo of the original crew. The toast to “absent friends” has been made in several other Trek episodes and it was particularly poignant when the shot that followed was of the late Anton Yelchin, so horribly taken too soon.

This Trek grew from its roots. It didn’t get stuck in them. This Trek stood on its own and added to the wealth, rather than simply retreading. Like Kirk and Spock at the end of this picture, Star Trek Beyond affirms the optimistic and humanistic ideals that are the undergirding principles of Star Trek.

Now, let’s hope the new TV show can do even better!