Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Onward and Upward
This is the first September in a long time where I haven't been going back to school, or else planning on going back to school. Even when I took two years off to work and travel and save for the next step I knew I'd be going back. As far back as I can remember I have been a student, and now I'm not. It's an odd feeling. I'm no longer part of that flurry and excitement of gathering supplies, buying clothing, moving into a new place, buying textbooks, finding my classes, and so on. It's both a relief and a source of sadness.
I spent a great deal of time in elementary school and high school trying to persuade my parents that I didn't need to go. I tried especially hard in Scarborough where school was scary and I was tormented on a daily basis. My reasoning was that I already knew more than our next door neighbour, and she seemed to be doing fine, so why did I need more schooling? This argument horrified my mother, as it no doubt provided her with images of me like Sandy: a thirty year old baby factory with vacant eyes and a huge chewy mole on her chin with a giant hair sticking out of it. I wasn't helping my case.
Thinking about going back to school makes me think about everything I learned, the way I spent those many, many years. You know, it really doesn't seem like all that much. This became painfully clear last night when I was trying to do some mental math in Staples. It took me a good twenty minutes to sort out how many envelopes I needed and whether or not I had enough money for them. Finally, I had to pull out a scrap of paper and the only pen I had. When you push down on the top of the pen a man wearing a pair of briefs loses them, and all is revealed.
I don't remember much about what I actually learned in school, post-secondary included. None of it really matters; school is a way of killing time and building character and learning to play the game of fitting into society. You learn to read, write, add, subtract, make fun of those different from you, how to gossip and not get caught and all of those fundamental things, but I'd like to know how colouring and filling out numerous graphs about precipitation across the provinces helped me to achieve any of my career goals? And Shakespeare, why was it mandatory to do a play every year? How has that helped? One could argue that every assignment was an exercise in mental gymnastics, that it simply teaches children how to think and solve problems. I wish someone had taught me about budgeting, and about how much money I needed to start saving during high school in order to not have monstrous debt when I graduated from university. Or how about a class that forced you to read and discuss the news every day, not just random events, but every day going through major news stories around the world and dissecting them for bias. That would have been so much more useful than memorising the contents of pemmican.
My university courses were even more questionable, and I paid for those! Every time I picked courses and told Val what I was taking he said it sounded like a round of Jeopardy: Sport in Antiquity, the Rise and Fall of Athens, Roman Revolution, a Zoological Perspective, Writing: Gender and Bias, Frontiers of the Roman Empire, etc. The wierdest course was Serial Murder. They didn't teach you technique or anything, it was a Sociology course. The textbook was a good read with lots of vignettes about the various killers. Was it Edmund Kemper who drove around with his mother's head in the car, and kept cutting the feet off prostitutes because of his foot fetish? That knowledge has also come in really handy. Thus far, the most useful course was the Psychology of Death and Dying. It takes you through the grieving process and also teaches you techniques on how to deal with the terminally ill and what you can expect from them (in terms of behaviour, it’s a given that you can expect them to die). The textbook was pretty depressing, but by and large I learned a lot that is both useful and applicable.
Even though I was terrified every year the first day of school came around, and I still remember how that terror felt, I’m missing being in school. Now that I’m all gainfully employed I feel kind of like I’m not really working toward anything. Maybe that isn’t exactly true. I have goals, I want a house and to eventually work from home, and to write a book and all, but these aren’t things I can sign up for and do in a set amount of time. They all depend directly on me and my ambition. I’m not all that ambitious, but I’d like to be. Maybe if I paid out money to write a book I’d do it more quickly. Not wanting to pay for another semester of my thesis was what prompted me to get my arse in gear with that.
I don’t miss math, though, or science, or group work. Oh man does group work ever suck. I was always the one who ended up doing the bulk of the work while everyone else flirted and joked. Now everyone who reads this is going to think I’m ugly. I’m not, I’m cute. Honest. The last group project I remember doing was on deforestation for Science in Society. We were in the library, and I was working with popular boys and my stomach was making the loudest and most alarming noises ever.
It’s okay though, I mean, I miss it and I’m nostalgic but also realistic. If I’m poor now, and boy am I, I can just imagine how destitute I’d be if continuing on for more education. There’s something to be said for digging yourself out of that sink hole of debt. I’m working on it, it’s a slow process, but it’ll happen. Probably a lot more quickly if I got going on that literary masterpiece I’ve been meaning to write. Stay tuned.
This is the first September in a long time where I haven't been going back to school, or else planning on going back to school. Even when I took two years off to work and travel and save for the next step I knew I'd be going back. As far back as I can remember I have been a student, and now I'm not. It's an odd feeling. I'm no longer part of that flurry and excitement of gathering supplies, buying clothing, moving into a new place, buying textbooks, finding my classes, and so on. It's both a relief and a source of sadness.
I spent a great deal of time in elementary school and high school trying to persuade my parents that I didn't need to go. I tried especially hard in Scarborough where school was scary and I was tormented on a daily basis. My reasoning was that I already knew more than our next door neighbour, and she seemed to be doing fine, so why did I need more schooling? This argument horrified my mother, as it no doubt provided her with images of me like Sandy: a thirty year old baby factory with vacant eyes and a huge chewy mole on her chin with a giant hair sticking out of it. I wasn't helping my case.
Thinking about going back to school makes me think about everything I learned, the way I spent those many, many years. You know, it really doesn't seem like all that much. This became painfully clear last night when I was trying to do some mental math in Staples. It took me a good twenty minutes to sort out how many envelopes I needed and whether or not I had enough money for them. Finally, I had to pull out a scrap of paper and the only pen I had. When you push down on the top of the pen a man wearing a pair of briefs loses them, and all is revealed.
I don't remember much about what I actually learned in school, post-secondary included. None of it really matters; school is a way of killing time and building character and learning to play the game of fitting into society. You learn to read, write, add, subtract, make fun of those different from you, how to gossip and not get caught and all of those fundamental things, but I'd like to know how colouring and filling out numerous graphs about precipitation across the provinces helped me to achieve any of my career goals? And Shakespeare, why was it mandatory to do a play every year? How has that helped? One could argue that every assignment was an exercise in mental gymnastics, that it simply teaches children how to think and solve problems. I wish someone had taught me about budgeting, and about how much money I needed to start saving during high school in order to not have monstrous debt when I graduated from university. Or how about a class that forced you to read and discuss the news every day, not just random events, but every day going through major news stories around the world and dissecting them for bias. That would have been so much more useful than memorising the contents of pemmican.
My university courses were even more questionable, and I paid for those! Every time I picked courses and told Val what I was taking he said it sounded like a round of Jeopardy: Sport in Antiquity, the Rise and Fall of Athens, Roman Revolution, a Zoological Perspective, Writing: Gender and Bias, Frontiers of the Roman Empire, etc. The wierdest course was Serial Murder. They didn't teach you technique or anything, it was a Sociology course. The textbook was a good read with lots of vignettes about the various killers. Was it Edmund Kemper who drove around with his mother's head in the car, and kept cutting the feet off prostitutes because of his foot fetish? That knowledge has also come in really handy. Thus far, the most useful course was the Psychology of Death and Dying. It takes you through the grieving process and also teaches you techniques on how to deal with the terminally ill and what you can expect from them (in terms of behaviour, it’s a given that you can expect them to die). The textbook was pretty depressing, but by and large I learned a lot that is both useful and applicable.
Even though I was terrified every year the first day of school came around, and I still remember how that terror felt, I’m missing being in school. Now that I’m all gainfully employed I feel kind of like I’m not really working toward anything. Maybe that isn’t exactly true. I have goals, I want a house and to eventually work from home, and to write a book and all, but these aren’t things I can sign up for and do in a set amount of time. They all depend directly on me and my ambition. I’m not all that ambitious, but I’d like to be. Maybe if I paid out money to write a book I’d do it more quickly. Not wanting to pay for another semester of my thesis was what prompted me to get my arse in gear with that.
I don’t miss math, though, or science, or group work. Oh man does group work ever suck. I was always the one who ended up doing the bulk of the work while everyone else flirted and joked. Now everyone who reads this is going to think I’m ugly. I’m not, I’m cute. Honest. The last group project I remember doing was on deforestation for Science in Society. We were in the library, and I was working with popular boys and my stomach was making the loudest and most alarming noises ever.
It’s okay though, I mean, I miss it and I’m nostalgic but also realistic. If I’m poor now, and boy am I, I can just imagine how destitute I’d be if continuing on for more education. There’s something to be said for digging yourself out of that sink hole of debt. I’m working on it, it’s a slow process, but it’ll happen. Probably a lot more quickly if I got going on that literary masterpiece I’ve been meaning to write. Stay tuned.
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