I remember that in Junior High, the teachers forewarned us of the dangerous rigors of High School, where in Responsibility ran rampant and Failure was imminent if we didn’t take it seriously, as though public senior high was a draconian boot camp where you had to successfully calculate pi to a million places while doing pushups with a heavyset teacher on your back. No surprise that high school was no different than junior high, except with bigger people.
I remember distinctly how in high school, the teachers forewarned us of the dangerous rigors of College, that scary place where only a select few would go, where Responsibility was the vicious bitch and Failure loomed, a dark spectre, if we slacked in our studies or indulged in partying. No surprise that college is nothing more than a looser version of high school.
I’ve been here for 3 semesters, now, studying Information Technology and Web Application Development, and I’ve yet to learn anything useful. So far, it’s been entirely introductory computer classes (which, naturally, I already kn0w), laughably easy liberal arts courses (in which I stomp the mouthbreathers into oblivion), and hard accounting courses that were made irrelevant by my decision not to pursue an MBA after I graduate. In fact, the only times I have learned anything have been on my own, in the course of my work here in University Web Services. If I wanted to learn faster, I’d buy a book.
And yet, for 8 months out of the year, I’m shuffling to class 12 or 15 hours a week, my biggest challenge being not to drool noticeably. This semester, I get to:
- Talk about theology with people that know nothing about theology
- Talk about philosophy with people that know nothing about philosophy
- Talk about literature with people that don’t care about or understand literature
- Take a networking course online (why?)
- Take a mandatory political science class that might rival my 8th grade constitution test in its difficulty and depth of content
- Do some website redesign for a local business. This will be the only worthwhile course of the semester.
I think possibly the funniest part about all this is the way my mother used to chastise me for my grandiloquence in writing, which let me glide through high school without ever having to a) read an assignment or b) spend much time writing. This, she said, was not good communication, and while it may fly in high school, they’d rip me to shreds in college. It goes without saying that once I got here, I was instantly lauded for my grandiloquence.
I wanted if she ever gets tired of being wrong. My mother’s one of those people that never tries to beat the system, and thinks that somehow makes her better or more virtuous. The only thing it ever makes her is irritated and exhausted.