This morning is Christian’s last required class for his PhD. He still needs to pass his comprehensive exams and write and defend his dissertation, but this is a seminal moment. His mindset  right now is that he never wants to ever take another class, but part of that might be the whole “senioritis” thing. If he had been on a normal trajectory, this would be the last year of his undergraduate degree. Still, the sentiment resonates with me. I have often heard that after a certain point, classes just get in the way of learning things and really they are as much a mechanism for keeping track of who can get good grades on their homework, papers, and tests as they are mechanisms for learning. In as much as those measures actually measure learning, even imperfectly, that is a good thing, but there is a “sell-by” date on their usefulness for people who progress pass the fundamentals of a discipline.