Nonsense Verse

You know you're back in school when ...

... you start having nightmares about grades.

Last night, I had a dream. Not a nightmare, okay, but more a mildly bad dream, an anxiety dream, in which I got back my first paper of the semester and it said — drum roll — B+. And I was DEVASTATED. This was a paper I had spent hours agonizing over: the first I'd written in nine years, my first chance to make an impression, my first true test. So what if it needed to be only three pages. So what if the topic was pretty much open. So what if one might argue this was the sort of thing I should be able to do in my sleep. The pressure was on! It's been years since I did the thesis → argument → back up argument thing. I can't remember the last time I wrote a footnote. (But oh, how I did enjoy Googling "footnote" and relearning how to do one. So orderly, the little footnotes. So mini. So cute.) In all, I spent a good three or four days revisiting the paper and tweaking and rewriting before I turned it in. If there hadn't been a deadline, I might still have been tweaking it last night. And then today. And into next week.

But back to the dream. In scanning the paper and reading the teacher's notes, I realized this was not my paper at all. The highlighted passages were crystal clear — when I woke up, I probably could have written them down if I had thought to reach for a pen — and they were quite distinctly not mine. Whew.

Then it happened again. I handed in the paper, got back another, began reading and realized that this, too, was not my paper. I turned that one back in, and ... it happened again. Which was way too much for my subconscious to handle, apparently, because then I woke up.

And so it begins.*

* Not that this is a bad thing. I might say this was going to be a looong semester, if only I wasn’t having so much damn fun.

The long tail of education*

"You have made the decision to significantly complicate your lives."

This is what the director of the Bachelor's Program at the New School told us in orientation yesterday, my first day on campus as a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed student. (Or, rather, as a frozen-eared, wind-whipped student. It was solidly down in the 30s last night. About time, Old Man Winter.)

I don't think it quite hit me that this was real until I arrived at the building on 13th Street and walked up the stairs to the auditorium on the second floor. A couple of helpful-looking twentysomethings sat behind a folding table, waiting for new arrivals.

"Are you a student?" they said.

I paused. I smiled. I thought, Well, how about that. And I said, "Yes, I am." A general sense of satisfaction suffused my body. It wasn't quite a tingling. It wasn't butterflies. It was more -- well, a warm thrill of possibility (to be completely cheesy).

There was milling around. There was picking up of collated handouts. There was some sizing up of our fellow guinea pigs, the stolen glances, the awkward shifting from left foot to right. There was waiting in line to be assigned an adviser, and there were the same cheeses and fruits, cookies and beverages on a long table off to the side of the auditorium that had been available for nibbling at the last New School event I attended.

This is a nice touch, I thought. I wondered if cheeses and fruits might be a regular component of my educational experience. I figured probably not. But perhaps one day I'll suggest that. This is a pretty hang-loose place.

Our keynote speaker was the same guy who did the presentation at the info session a couple of months ago, and this time I walked away liking him even more. The personal story he told, about his long, circuitous path to the New School, was yet more assurance that yes, this was the right decision:

- Musician in Chicago
- Restaurateur in Wisconsin
- Husband, father
- Aspiring C.P.A.
- Student of mathematics and physics
- Student of art, resulting in M.F.A.
- Student of philosophy, resulting in Ph.D.
- Professor, artist, all-around nifty dude

The message being, if he did it, then so can we. And: You can't predict where you're going to end up. And also: It's never too late to stop in the middle of something, reassess, and try something new.

I'm about to turn 30. I have no idea if this fact had anything to do with my decision to go back to school. But I like to think that the decision had less to do with panic and much more to do with the natural course of a life, the bend in the river we all come to as challenges arise and are conquered, as certain priorities shift, and as we start to think, Well, gosh -- now what? Yes, 30 is an obvious benchmark, and it's a deadline many people set themselves to step back, evaluate, and start throwing around scary, entirely subjective words like "success" or "failure." But not being one to believe in that sort of thing, I'd rather look at it as a coincidence, or maybe a convenience -- an easy number to remember when it comes time to calculate credits and count semesters and assign a year to the ol' résumé saying what I was doing when.

It's also a nice round number to see when notating a list à la this:

- Ballet dancer (5 to 18)
- College student, Round 1 (18 to 21)
- Intern (21)
- Editor, online (21 to 25)
- Editor, in print (25 to … )
- College student, Round 2 (30 to … )

And what's after that? We'll call it this:

- TBA ( … to … )

* Taken from the orientation keynote. Reference to Chris Anderson's book "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More," which only one person in the auditorium had read, but which we were told is about niche businesses and a vision of the "shattering of the mainstream." Applied to education, the "long tail" is the philosophy of the New School: an education tailored to each individual, comprising those topics that are particularly fascinating and relevant to that person's life -- i.e., the only kind of education that makes sense, IMHO.

Oh, did I mention?

Good start to the day: Getting New School ACCEPTANCE LETTER!

Bad start to the rest of the day: Being totally unable to concentrate on anything else, like current cartooning homework. Oops.

Best comment of the day: "Heh. And here I thought I'd never sleep with a college girl again."

Classy. Reeeeealllll classy.

They called!

"They" being the New School. I go in for an interview next week. (Teeth chattering, knees wobbling. Eee eee eee!)

For those of you keeping score

Yes, that last post means that I have decided to go for it. Turns out the tuition reimbursement program at my place of work ain't too shoddy. In fact, it's just enough to limit me to a sane number of classes per semester, so even if I want to exhaust myself to make serious headway, I can't! Of course, I get ahead of myself: They've got to let me in the door first.

What to write

For some reason I get all paralyzed when I read things like this:

Write about a book or film that has provided you with a new way of thinking. Describe how this work has influenced the way you see yourself, others or society.

Guidelines as broad as this inspire a serious case of option paralysis. It's like going to Shopsin's (PDF) and looking at all the combinations of yummy goodness, hundreds and hundreds of possibilities, and just as you've scanned them all and think you've finally narrowed it down to half a dozen things, you flip the menu over and find...LUNCH!

In this case the films would probably be breakfast, and the books, lunch. I can't explain why. For some reason I associate watching movies with moles in the hole and fluffernutter french toast and raspberry mac-n-cheese pancakes with a side of andouille sausage. Books are much more bacon burger deluxe, more reuben on rye, more Waldorf salad.

Is the piece of paper worth the cost?

I went to a presentation at the New School today to hear about its adult bachelor's program. As I have been with most things when it comes to maybe going back to school, I was pretty ambivalent going in. In fact, on the way, the cute guy I took with me to hold my hand (and keep me from blowing the whole thing off and going to get pizza instead) said, "Sooooo, are you excited?" To which I replied: "Not really. I'm pretty ambivalent." (See?)

But then a funny thing happened. The kind, well-spoken presenter-guy started talking, and I did get excited. He began with a brief history on the principles on which the New School was founded, and went on to describe the degrees offered, the concentrations of study, the classroom environment, and the kind of person who would make a good New School student. And everything started to click.

Do I agree that the best education comes not from the transfer of knowledge alone, but from mentoring, intensive discussion and hands-on work? Check.

Am I a mature, independent learner with the ability to make my own educational choices? Double check.

Am I turned on by the various courses of study offered: democracy and cultural pluralism, the writing & democracy program, music, art, language, dance? Check, check, check.

Am I interested in earning a degree that does not require me to go back and relearn math? SIGN ME UP!

I flipped through the course catalog and found all sorts of things to sink my brain into -- essay writing, cultural reporting, a graphic novel workshop, "shakespeare, history and poetry," "guillotine to guantanamo: a history of human rights," "privacy and surveillance," "the morality of war and nonviolence," "the fairy tale and literature."

Even better, next to each course was listed a very affordable-looking price: $550, for the most part. I could go back to school without going into debt! At the end of the presentation I made an appointment to meet with an admissions counselor right away. And I had every intention of going for it this time.

But that was before I read the fine print.

When I got home I looked at the course catalog more carefully, and in scanning the contents, I found at the bottom the crucial section on "interpreting the course description." I flipped to it, and lo! There it was: the dreaded asterisk, to the right of the dollar amount. I scrolled down to the footnote, which explained, "If you are taking a course for credit, you do not pay this fee. General credit tuition is $870 per credit."

That's the school's italics there, not mine. But trust me, I feel those italics. They're not kidding: $870 per credit requires some emphasis. It's nowhere near $550 per class. It's also enough to take my fiery ball of excitement and splash cold water all over it. Pffffft.

Of course, for a real-for-sure university education, ending with a real-for-sure university diploma, what did I expect, right? To earn that piece of paper like every other student shuffling through the university system, I have to do just like everyone else: not only earn it, but pay for it, too.

So now I take the question to all of you: Is it worth it?

One could argue that I'm at a point in my life where I don't need it. I could just as easily pay the $550 and take whatever classes I want for no credit. I'll get the same education, for much less money, and the only difference at the end of the day is that I won't be able to put "graduated" on my résumé.

Then again, knowing that I'm getting the same education as everyone else, and that at the end of the day I won't get the credit for it -- that kind of peeves me off, too. Grrr.

What would you do?