Adapting Sherlock Holmes
An English professor uses Sherlock Holmes to teach her students not to separate academic knowledge from their own hard-earned experiential lessons.
A battle rages within many college students of my acquaintance between a certain bravado meant to signal there’s nothing they don’t know and a looming suspicion there’s nothing they do. It’s the same battle that rages in the rest of us, but with age we grow more adept at concealing it. The struggle is intensified in my students by the fact that they are also cadets at a military academy, where initial training impresses upon them their radically diminished authority and where the predetermination of their first job (second lieutenant in a time of war) understandably tempts them to test the immediate application of whatever knowledge comes their way.
