I spent part of my afternoon on a beautiful May Day with about 20 students and faculty participating in a marathon reading of John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. Published in England in 1667, Paradise Lost is Milton’s twelve-book, over 10,000-line poetic retelling of the story of Adam and Eve. It is one of the greatest and most influential poems in English.
It is also a notoriously hard one. Milton’s syntax and language are difficult even for native speakers of English. For the students in Mason Korea Professor Hyunyoung Cho’s English courses, who made up many of the readers and many of whom are native Korean speakers, the poetry is particularly challenging. But there they were, wrestling with Milton’s language and belting it out to the assembled crowd. And over the course of the reading, over 100 students participated in the reading marathon.
As I listened to the students work through Milton’s language, I thought about how I and my fellow students in the Korean class I am taking at Mason this year struggle with Korean. But like the students reading Milton, we are learning about a new language and with it a new culture. Our non-native Korean speakers in their Korean language classes are similarly adventurous—intellectually and otherwise. They are putting themselves out there: even if they are standing in front of the class explaining in simple Korean how to get from one place to another on the Seoul subway, rather than in complex English how Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden.
A few weeks ago, Mason held its annual Mason Day spring festival, the biggest one yet, in the same place we were reading Paradise Lost. And in the same place, students were similarly putting themselves out there.
While there were two professional music acts, the highlights of our Mason Day were the student ones. There were K-Pop and Bollywood dancers, and student musical performances of all kinds in both English and Korean, including by our Mason Korea “house band” Sketch, and a new group GLOA Playlist. GLOA Playlist featured all three Mason Korea professors in the Global Affairs program performing along with student majors in Global Affairs.
We have some wonderfully talented dancers and musicians among our students. But even more, like the students reading Paradise Lost or learning how to give subway directions in Korean, they are all putting themselves out there, and growing with each challenge. That kind of boldness is a given at Mason Korea’s multilingual and multicultural campus and is what for me makes Mason Korea a special place.