Written by Panhavotey Chea

If there is one skill that high school taught me to value, it’s my ability to read, remember, and reiterate what’s in the textbook. The more I think about it, the more I understand why I struggled the way I did during L&T. The program was built to make you think for yourself in relation to your environment, and I was never taught how to do that.

In schools back in Cambodia, my home country, students are expected to come to class with all materials prepared and ready before class starts. The classrooms are arranged to suit the teaching style there, mainly lectures, where all chairs face the whiteboard at the front. Our teachers talk, we listen, and for the most part, we don’t question. Bard, on the other hand, is the total opposite. Over the summer, we were assigned a book to read before the first day of class. I assumed we would be lectured on how to understand the novel, but our professor began by asking us what we thought of the piece and what we took away from it. I remember thinking to myself, “Is this normal?”

The classrooms were designed to foster discussion. We always sat around roundtables and started each class with what they called “free writing,” where our professor would give us a prompt and we would write about our understanding of the topic at hand. International students or not, we were all just students trying to learn something new every day. After writing down our thoughts, we were encouraged to share them with the class, which opened up another opportunity, to refine our ideas and build a more well-informed understanding of the subject moving forward. Every discussion enriched another in ways I had never experienced before, and that’s exactly what I love about L&T.

For example, one activity involved creating a class playlist and then trying to find an overarching theme to connect all the songs. I still stand by this: that kind of exercise continues to benefit me in my politics classes today. It taught me to examine each individual aspect - or each song, in that case - and understand it from my own perspective, then refine that understanding through discussions with professors and peers. We all started on equal footing, and whenever we felt like we weren’t doing as well as we hoped, there were resources available, like the Learning Commons and our professors, to support every student.

Looking back, the program provided a smooth transition into my actual classes at Bard, both in terms of expectations and environment. It taught me the value of how understanding takes shape in the world, and how it can be either beneficial or problematic depending on how we choose to use the resources at our disposal. L&T is designed to be a safe space for students to explore, make mistakes, and develop opinions that shape our understanding of ourselves, our environment, and those around us. It’s a space where we learn to find common ground by continually practicing and refining our writing and communication skills.

Written on Nov. 2, 2025