This Blog was intended for me to write about writing, and, of course, girls. But it's getting impossible to ignore the bigger picture out there.
Let's not talk about me, for a moment; the big thing I notice is how my students really struggle with everything: classes, choosing courses, focusing on their schoolwork, dealing with their parents, and fear of graduating. Some of them are actually unhappy about visits from their families, and the seniors —whom I don't teach, actually; I usually teach underclassmen, though I help some senior friends informally— actually regarded their impending graduations with dread.
Graduation is over, now; we're looking at the new year, and freshmen —the gender-neutral word is "frosh", which I find perfectly dreadful— are coming on campus. I have little or nothing to do with freshmen at this stage; I will certainly meet them in class soon enough. But I'm now brave enough to hang around the lounges during orientation, and occasionally get talked to by parents, and some freshmen —OK, frosh, then— themselves. Of course, some of the girls are just beautiful, but I know that if they take their looks too much to heart, they're going to be very unattractive as people very soon. I was an attractive kid, I know now; the people who took note of me then I learned to despise, as soon as I got sophisticated enough to be able to understand how they thought.
Getting ready for life, when I was just out of high school, was very easy for me: I would go to college, and then to grad school, and train to be a college professor. Some of the other kids who graduated with me wanted to capitalize on their looks, and became flight attendants, or secretaries, or salesgirls, or got into advertising, or became actresses, or reporters; they had to artificially beef up their personalities (well, some of them had pretty big personalities already, I have to admit), put on makeup, dress fashionably, suck money out of their parents, and went out there to do their thing. (I didn't put on serious makeup until I was thirty, and put on a little lip color before I went in front of my first class. These days, I've graduated to doing a little more with my face, but nothing beyond lip color, eyebrow pencil, and a soupçon of eye makeup. Just a tad.)
These days, especially with guys, things are different. I guess things were always different with guys; I just never paid any attention to them when I was younger. My eyes were always on the girls and the women; they were just more interesting, the ones who were interesting at all. The others I just ignored, or despised. As I got older, I despise fewer and fewer people, and I have some insight even into the minds of boys and men. The lines are blurring, and I don't think it's entirely subjective. I think guys are beginning to think a little more like women, all of them, except for a few rednecks (or maybe a whole lot of rednecks; thank the universe I don't encounter rednecks in great numbers), and the rednecks on campus are just redneck wannabees. They wear their necks like a uniform; it is something they have to put on in the morning, just like girls put on their faces. The more vulnerable they feel, the louder they rev their motors as they drive off. It's all an act. Mostly.
But kids have no idea what courses to take. The brighter ones are constantly second-guessing themselves even when they're in class: is this class a total waste of time? Perhaps I should have taken Marketing instead.
One thing is certain: You have to learn to write properly in college, and you have to learn to talk properly. For all the million purposes your future employers want to put you, and for which they want you to be a college graduate (you would think that they want a college education, but you would probably be wrong), being able to write well—Okay, moderately well—and to speak well: those are the most important. There is a good possibility that your employer might not be able to tell the difference, but don't take the risk.
What should you put on your bucket list for your college experience? Make no mistake, college is an experience, though it could be used as a sort of boot camp.
Basic reading, writing, and being able to use a calculator. Any high-school grad should have these skills, but the environment of high school is too fraught with silliness—on the part of the students, the teachers, and the parents—to make this very likely. When I graduated from high school, I could write better than most college grads of today. And I went to a very poor basic rural neighborhood high school, nothing special.
Use a computer, and use Word (or Open Office, or whatever), use a printer, use e-mail, use a browser, and maybe make a web page using HTML —you know, the usual italics and bold tags, nothing fancy. Maybe a hyperlink or two.
Good interpersonal skills. Listen to someone with interest; be able to keep up your end of a conversation with intelligence; be able to chat to a big shot without being too obsequious. Be polite even to someone who is obnoxious. (I sometimes fail at this; I was pulled up for snapping at a student. That was the first and last time.)
Specialize in something. But this something need not be what your job is in. You could be a small time office manager in a car-repair shop, but your degree might be in music. Ignorant people always assume that you have to get a job in your major. They're surprised that a music major can write, or that an art major can do math. It's too complicated (and sort of old news, actually) as to why it's important to specialize in something, but trust me: it's important. Given that, you must not specialize in that something to the degree that you don't know anything else. That's the big mistake people sometimes make: college kids are too specialized. No; unfortunately, they're sometimes not specialized at all. Shh, it'll be our little secret.
Good speaking skills. This means that you can present some idea efficiently and effectively to a gathering, that's all. Oratory is not needed. You must be able to prepare, and give, a presentation on some assigned topic. If you've never done it, you will never have any idea as to what is required. You should not depend on PowerPoint. You should be able to use any equipment that is available. If complicated visuals are essential, well, that's different. But a small presentation should be well within the capabilities of a college graduate. This means that you can teach if you have to, or if you would like to.
Have an appreciation for people significantly different from yourself, and the people you grew up with. A job could require you to relate to people from other states and countries, other religions, other sexual preferences, and other economic conditions than yourself. This is why most colleges insist on their graduates learning a foreign language,
Have an appreciation for art, music, dance, theatre, and literature. You have to talk to people about what they're interested in, and it helps if you happen to be interested in those things too. In addition, the Arts help you relate to the world, which is a more important thing that people will tell you.
Above all, be willing to do any work that's necessary. I have no respect for people who consider themselves above necessary work.
Now, it comes down to these big questions:
(1) Should I go to a big expensive college, or go to a community college, or go to a professional school?
(2) Should I do a major in a subject I like, or in something like Business, to get a job, or like education, to become a teacher?
(3) Should I only do my major, and the degree requirements, or should I do courses just for fun, as well?
Frankly, I don't know. When I went to college, these were not important issues —for me. We were a poor family, but our thinking was big, because my mother had a middle-class upbringing, and my dad had many middle class friends, though he himself was from a working-class family. In fact, many of our friends were college professors, because we lived in a university town, and both my parents were adjunct (part-time) college professors.
I would certainly have gone to college, though I could only afford a middle-level college, and I got a lot of scholarships. But for today's kids: I just don't know. This is a very different world from that into which I was disgorged after college, or even when I was home for the summer. It makes me mad that kids have to choose, because that's almost like selecting their social class soon after high school. Never mind that some of the richest people today belong, as far as I'm concerned, in a very low social class, lacking the cultural education that qualifies them to be true citizens.
If you choose to go to college, I would say: postpone choosing a major as long as you can. The typical high school graduate—and this might not be you—has no inkling about what there is within any subject at all. You should have found out in high school, but in the world we have now, you will probably find out—if you're lucky—in college. By Junior Year, you will have reliable opinions about what subjects and disciplines are interesting to you, and then choose something interesting, which is my answer to (2). Like I said, what you choose should not have huge implications for your job. But hiring and firing has now been outsourced to so-called "Human Resources Experts", who seem to select people for jobs based on criteria that I certainly would not use. Because of how unreliable college education is becoming (on top of the unreliability of high school education), businesses should administer a test to their hires before signing their contracts, or they should hire for a probationary period. So, if you expect to work for an idiot who thinks that if you're going to work for a business, you need a Business degree, I suppose you should do a business degree. That will pretty much doom you to working for idiots for much of your life, because Business majors have a bad reputation. In fact, up to a few years ago many MBA programs did not even accept Business majors. But it may be that things are different, because Business Schools have strong Business lobbies, which endow Business Departments in small colleges, and they push for businesses to hire their Business alumni.
By now, you should know that the answer to (3) is: take courses for fun, too. You should certainly take courses that will make you a useful employee, e.g. using a database program, or how to use a spreadsheet, or how to create a webpage, or conversational Chinese. I never did these things, and I am just amazingly lucky—so far—that I haven't had to work outside my expertise. My background is in music, religion and history (go figure), but I teach writing, and luckily, that's sort of within my competency, because I did a post-graduate course in teaching writing. Still, I took other courses for fun: computer programming (yes, it was a lot of fun, but computers have gone beyond my comfort zone), piano (which is still useful), and art. I had to teach myself Spreadsheets, and I still don't know Database Systems, and I learned Web Programming in college, as an enrichment course.
Kay
