Morris Hackney Professor of Physics Dr. Duane Pontius ’81 wrote this letter to high school students pursuing their educations during self-isolation and the extreme change in daily life that comes with it. He provides helpful advice for those who want to actively feed their minds and curiosity.

“Letter to a High School Student”

You have found yourself confined to home during one of the most developmentally important parts of life, your high school years. You are doubtlessly struggling with a combination of anxiety, boredom, restlessness, and ennui. (You may not know that last word but, trust me, it exactly captures your mood.) You also sense the looming presence of college in the offing, either a few months away or a year or two later.

So how should a young person with academic ambitions occupy themselves over the coming weeks? Moreover, how can they prepare for that conventional challenge, the college interview or essay? There are scores of sources for advice on how to respond to the raft of traditional questions, which are all variations on one theme: Describe an important experience/ book/person that affected how you understand the world.

However, for the foreseeable future, your response will be examined with a critical eye toward uncovering one matter: What did you do during the pandemic quarantine?

This period is extraordinary for many reasons I need not list here, but your answer will reveal volumes about what kind of student you are. If you happen to be involved in health care and can respond that you were actively assisting in responding to the crisis, my advice here does not apply. For the rest of you, now is the time to establish credentials.

There is one word that should not appear: binge. Even if the objects are critically acclaimed, binge-watching or binge-reading has a connotation of consumption without processing, introspection, or reflection, just as with binge-eating. In contrast, your goal is to develop habits of discernment.

This will require you to become a self-starter if you are not one already. If your parents have brought this letter to your attention, that’s fine, but you must proceed without their further prodding. The first step to starting yourself is to find a topic that will engage your attention for a prolonged interval, and you must discover that within.

Since my own days in college, I have carried a list with me of things I don’t understand, first in a paper notebook, then in a Palm Pilot (an electronic “personal data assistant”), and now in my phone. I make a point to record my ignorance, for the first step to learning something new is identifying what is available to be learned. For example, “Chinese history” joined the list after a visit to the National Palace Museum in Taipei when I realized that my ignorance of China is as broad as the country itself. “Preterite vs. imperfect tense” is probably the most senior item on the list.

When time permits, I’ll peruse what’s available and choose one that intrigues me and seems worthwhile. It should also be plausible to master in the time available, which may range from a few hours to the rest of my life. Sometimes the task is fairly straightforward, such as when I had three hours on a plane and worked through the math behind a particular statistical distribution. (I am a physicist, after all.) At other times it’s taken a year of dedicated study, such as trying to understand what money really is, which required working through a textbook from an economics colleague, swapped for an astronomy textbook. The same was true for trying to understand exactly what pH is and – more importantly – why it plays such a central role in chemistry.

Your first task is to find something that motivates you enough to spend many often-frustrating hours studying on it. (If there are no such subjects, are you sure you want to go to college right now? This isn’t a judgmental question; it’s simply asking you to examine your goals.) Since this may be your first attempt at focused investigation and discovery, try to find a topic that is fairly constrained but which can eventually interweave with other topics: The Great Depression, programming in Python, impressionism, fluid mechanics, theories of mind, the poetry of Yeats, perhaps the biology of viruses.

Next, move beyond self-starting to self-driving. Working through means more than just reading. It implies dedicating undistracted time to an intense focus on your object of investigation, which professor and author Cal Newport calls “Deep Work.” It requires putting away social media for long stretches and seeking isolation from your family even as you shelter together in place.

It also requires you to become comfortable with not immediately understanding. If you are already a good student and accustomed to merely attending classes and absorbing material via aural osmosis, this will be a wake-up call. Students who have never had to develop study skills all eventually learn a hard truth: no matter how strong your natural talents, academic material will eventually exceed your complexity horizon, the bounds beyond which your current intellectual capacity fails. It is a humbling experience. The only alternative is to decline further growth and restrict yourself to unchallenging activities.

Now is the time to push yourself into an uncomfortable realm where things do not come easily to you. Weaker students often have an advantage here if they have had to develop strategies to overcome their shortcomings. Your work must become methodical as you seek to identify things to learn. Your personal notes should document your exploration, recording not just what is true, but misconceptions you have found and how they were vanquished along the way. Knowing why a falsehood fails is just as important as knowing why a truth succeeds.

Do not expect things to go smoothly. As you encounter unfamiliar terms and apparently contradictory sentences, write them down and mark them for further investigation. We tend to avoid recognizing and admitting our ignorance, viewing it as a personal flaw, but just the opposite is true. Learning to accept that you don’t know something is a strength, a powerful skill, whereas shame lies in hiding your ignorance and letting it persist.

Finally, you have to become a self-finisher. You won’t finish in any absolute sense, but you must seek intermediate milestones marking solid accomplishments: The sequence of events in 1929, how to write a FOR loop, telling Matisse from Monet, Bernoulli’s equation, Descartes vs. Skinner, the rhythmic structure of “Sailing to Byzantium,” the metabolic processes of viruses. At these points you should have a product that makes sense, a coherent explanation in your own words. Each of these should bring you a sense of satisfaction at being able to identify a clear area of knowledge that you have mastered.

To assess that mastery, wait a day and try to reproduce it without reference to your original product. Doing so may again reveal areas of uncertainty, which is good because it informs you where further work is needed. To merely revisit yesterday’s notes will produce an unjustified sense of confidence, a conviction that, “oh, yeah, I knew that.” Such feelings of “déjà knew” are misleading, as there is a profound difference between being able to produce a valid statement and just being able to recognize one. The only truly effective way to study is by challenge, not by confirmation.

Such a program of study requires hard work, personal discipline, and intentionality, but it is within the capabilities of any determined student. I offer similar advice regularly to struggling students in my own classes, and I regularly hear back about its effectiveness. With that, I wish you luck and fortitude. Stay safe, stay calm, don’t panic.

Duane H. Pontius, Jr.
(who reached his own complexity horizon at 3 a.m. on September 25, 1981)
T. Morris Hackney Professor of Physics