After we finished installing our youngest son in his Freshman dorm room, he pushed us out so fast he nearly strained us through the keyhole. He hustled us off the way your immune system rejects a disease, the way a sovereign nation rejects an invading army, the way Jennifer rejected Brad when she found out about Angelina. After eighteen years of living under our control, he’s eager to be out on his own.
I can understand that. His generation was the most monitored in the history of education. When I was in school, I had a Vegas-like attitude; what happened in fourth period history, stayed in fourth period history. Except, that it often didn’t happen. I found it difficult to pay attention in Mr. Harris’ class because the girl in the desk ahead of me had the most heavenly scent. When I finally worked up the courage to ask her what it was, she said, “Ivory soap.”
Being an adolescent male, I wasn’t particularly familiar with soap and thus found the fragrance intoxicating. Unfortunately, my brain was so busy processing vital smell-related information, it was unavailable to deal with the barrage of history-related facts that Mr. Harris kept firing at us. It also didn’t have time to pay attention to the fine details of class assignments such as when they were due or what they were about.
Fortunately, my brain possessed enough left-over horsepower to notice when midterms were approaching and it was especially good at begging for extra-credit assignments so as to avoid having to find a way to explain a failing notice to my parents. I graduated with a modest GPA, a small scholarship, and solid understanding of the concept of just-in-time management.
By contrast, my children lived in a hothouse where I could observe their academic missteps. Every assignment, presentation, quiz, or final exam triggered an automatic e-mail home that detailed how many points were possible and how close my child had come to the mark. Ships at sea and spacecraft in orbit aren’t as closely monitored as my sons.
As a teen, I came home to a routine Q&A in which Mom asked what had happened at school and I said, “Nothing.” In teen-speak this translated to, “nothing I’m willing to tell you about because you’d freak out because I’m so far behind but I’ll make it up before the midterm.” My sons didn’t have the same luxury. The e-mail would beat them home and I’d meet them with “I’m freaked out because you’re so far behind and there’s no way you can make it up by the midterm.”
Secretly, I pitied them, but not enough to actually stop reading the e-mail messages.
Really.
So it’s no wonder my son was eager to be out on his own; experiencing the world and learning exciting new things. I envy him, until I remember a lot of the lessons in college weren’t on the curriculum and a few of them were downright tough.
One of the first things I learned was that they don’t take attendance in college. Nobody cared if I showed up. Not having to be in class left me free to explore other interests such as napping, daytime television, and pizza box origami. It also left me free of any actual learning.
At the end of the term when my report card arrived and my GPA looked like the average December temperature at the North Pole, I was very upset with my brain. It had let me down in the neatly-avoiding-disaster department. My brain countered that I had kept it so busy with trivia that it didn’t have time to worry about the future. Besides, it added, there were other factors.
My Calculus class was one of those factors. The instructor had a Hungarian name that defied my attempts at pronunciation and he started the first lecture with, “I speak very small Anglis.” That was the last thing I understood. The failing grade wasn’t a surprise to me or my brain, we just didn’t know what to do about it. The next semester I took Calculus from an American professor and, as it turned out, the biggest barrier to my success wasn’t language … it was mathematics.
I wouldn’t want to give the impression that I didn’t learn anything useful in college. After those rough first couple of semesters, my brain regained its powers and started to develop strategies for dealing with classwork. English assignments could almost always be left to the last minute, particularly those from professors who had graduated during the seventies and wanted me to share my “exploration of the intellectual space mapped out in the subtext of Updike’s novels as echoed in the poetry of Rod McKuen.” Math and science assignments had to be completed immediately and reworked five or six times until I had two sets of answers that agreed to within a value of fifteen percent. Other work was fitted in between those extremes.
Another skill I had to learn was how to navigate a bureaucracy. Fortunately, my Freshman English class devoted a lot of time to Kafka — possibly for this very reason. I’m not saying the university was unnecessarily bureaucratic; unless your definition of bureaucracy includes pointless rules, endless forms and mind — and bladder — stretchingly long lines. My actions (filling out forms and randomly paying people strange amounts of money for services I didn’t want) seemed largely unrelated to my goals (earning a degree and starting a career.) In fact, by following the logic of the University, I might as well have buried a light bulb in the garden in hopes that it would grow into an electrical plant.
Yet, somehow, all of the checks and forms and assignments and grades balanced out and I was awarded a degree. Now both of my sons are playing the academic game. I’d give them advice on how to succeed, but I’m not sure they’d believe me.
