College: A Review So Far

I have now successfully completed my first month of college. My carefully mapped out "one year off after high school to find myself, have a road trip with girlfriends where we earn gas money by singing karaoke in a truck stop, and learn street smarts through the hard knocks of life..." Well, that catapulted into five years of doing nothing. And here's a little secret from me to you--no one wants to learn street smarts through the hard knocks of life. It's stupid and it sucks. It's much better to study tragic stories in English and write essays about them rather than chasing after them yourself because you htink it'll make you better educated than all those college yuppies.

I'm enrolled in two classes this semester, just six credits while I get used to the discipline and the schedule. Turns out a five year break from officially learning in a classroom can make your brain feel like it's been pickling in a jar. Remember, I am double majoring in Biology and Behavioral Science, then the plan is to get into the University of Utah's Master of Biology program and work my tail off. All of this within a reasonable amount of time, or before I have grandchildren, hopefully.

So far? I love college. I sat in the front row with three sharpened #2 Bic pens (because I hate pencils) and took notes on every word. I came home and looked back over the syllabus and outlined all my homework in one night. That was for class number one, Humanities Through the Arts.

My second class? Well, it was supposed to be a two and a half hour class, and the first night the teacher let us out after forty minutes, because "she knew we were all anxious to get home." I was so disappointed. She reminded us to keep our homework assignment responses short, because "she wasn't in the mood to read a three page long answer about co-sleeping benefits." I was devastated. A minimum number of words for an essay? My world doesn't make sense!

My first impressions of my two classes have changed drastically. A second look at my Humanities class made me chuckle. My teacher wrote her own textbook, charges us full price to pay for it, and when I bought it and read it, I was horrified to find it self-published, with no pictures, and my red pen is aching to get into those pages and correct all her spelling and grammar. And I understand I'm in Utah County, where the LDS church permeates everything, even the tattoo parlors--but can we NOT study LDS hymns as examples of beautiful music contributing to the humanities? Chopin is rolling over in his grave. So's John Lennon.

My human development class is a requirement for a Behavioral Science degree. I almost transferred out after that first class--I was not anxious to get home, I was anxious to get cracking! Let's study it all! We're skipping chapters in the book, we're ignoring Freud, who I do NOT agree with on everything, but he did influence modern psychoanalysis, so why would we skip him? Argh.

My whole rant was to let you know that I'm working hard. I'm enjoying school. I wish I had gone right out of high school. I wish I could take twenty credits. I won't be taking summers off in an attempt to get this Bachelor's degree stuff over with quickly. I am so tempted to write a paper on--I don't know, Henry Miller--and just make my Humanities professor's jaw drop. I'm that student, yes, I know, hate me.

The best, though, was coming out of that first night of human development, muttering to myself about paying full price for a class when the teacher lets me out two hours early... I looked over at a roster of professors in our satellite building, saw who was teaching Chemistry at UVU, and realized, wow. They really let anyone become professors these days, don't they?

Wink.