So often, and especially as the end of the semester approaches, students come to my office near tears, and not the making-excuses-for-late-papers kind of tears (well, maybe sometimes), but the my-life-feels-like-it's-spinning-out-of-control kind of tears. They lose friends to accidents or violence, find out they're pregnant, learn that a parent has lost a job and might need them to come home. Or they just realize that decisions they made earlier in the semester weren't as inconsequential as they anticipated. I don't accept excuses very often, but I can't withhold sympathy. And I always wish I had something better to say to them.
So, freshman year (sorry...."your first year of college") can suck. It can suck really quite badly, for reasons that I don’t need to outline here because you are living them. It can also, of course, be wonderful and amazing and magical. I don’t mean to dismiss that; it’s just that at this point in the semester, the suckiness tends to outweigh the magicalness by a significant amount.
Some of you are probably finding that college is much harder than you expected it to be. This makes me mad because it tells me that educators—maybe on the high school end, maybe on the college end, maybe both—aren’t doing their jobs well. Forgive me for saying it—I don’t mean to insult anyone—but having taught high school for a few years, I saw how much the average high school falls short from giving students what they need and deserve. I’ll bet that many of you not only got straight As and Bs in high school, but got them without breaking a sweat. Now you’re taking college chemistry or calculus or whatever and you feel like you’re drowning just to pass with a D. You probably turned in first drafts for As in high school, and now you’re having to write and rewrite just to barely get a C. That’s not right, because it means that you weren’t pushed to work to your potential in high school. It means you were allowed to skate by, and led to expect that education was easy.
The same was true for me. I had never worked very hard in school, and suddenly, in my freshman year, I was getting up early to study and staying up late to write papers and still barely making it in some of my classes. It got better—much better; better to the point of being more enjoyable than it was painful. The same will be true for you. Depending on how hard the semester has been for you, that might sound completely hollow and meaningless, but I hope you’ll take my word for it. It will get easier. I need to add ONE qualification to that: while my roommates let off stress by enjoying various intoxicating crops and beverages, I studied. It didn’t get better for my roommates. (This is not a “say no to drugs” message, I just don’t want you to come back in two years and tell me “it didn’t get better” in between hiccups as I recoil from the smell of Night Train on your breath. My former roommates are, for the most part, successful and happy people now. They’re just not college graduates). The point is: barring poor prioritizing or errors in judgment on your part, it will get better.
Another thing that still baffles me a little: you all are not a normal class. You weren’t specially selected or anything, but somehow your group ended up being different from the usual freshman writing class in some interesting ways. What I’ve seen in your writing is a kind of humor and style and playfulness that is, in my opinion, the mark of solid intellect. I’m not saying your essays were mind-blowing all the time, but I am saying that even when they were weak, they still had that mark. I don’t think I got a single one of what most writing instructors complain about, the dry and lifeless 5-paragraph essay that is grammatically flawless but says absolutely nothing. Your writing—and the mind that produced it—has substance. If I were in charge of admissions at a university, that would be my #1 criteria because that is what’s going to make your college education meaningful. All the skills--like how to use a semicolon or how to…jeez, I can’t even think of an example for chemistry…all I remember is making soap in the lab--can be learned by anyone. To be able to use the skills in a meaningful way, that’s something that (in my opinion), you either know or you don’t, and you all are in the first category.
Here’s the rub: that quality—intellect—is also going to make your college education challenging and perhaps painful at times. It took me a very long time to realize this, and even longer to accept it, but learning is painful. I don’t mean just painfully boring—it hurts. It’s like growing pains. Your worldview is expanding, your perspective is stretching, your capacity for abstract thinking (which, by the way, isn’t fully developed until age 30!) is being pushed beyond its old boundaries. It’s just like pre-season workouts for whatever sport you might’ve played: they hurt, and they suck, they give you blisters and make you throw up and you can’t wait for them to be over. That’s what the first semester of freshman year is like. You’re getting in shape for college, and it’s punishing. And though it will get better, it should never be totally comfortable. After a really good class, I’ve realized, I’m often exhausted. I think that’s because learning something really meaningful does a couple of things. It shakes your foundation by showing you that something you’d always taken for granted is much, much more complicated than you ever realized, and it sets off a chain reaction in your brain. Here’s a very basic example from my freshman year. In a class called “semiotics” we started by talking about how language is basically arbitrary. The only reason that the letters “t-r-e-e” mean the wooden, leafy thing outside the window is because we all agree on it. If everyone who spoke English agreed to it, we could start calling that thing “e-r-t” and it work work every bit as well as “tree.” The more I thought about it, the more I realized how many things that we take for granted—I mean, ever since I was a kid I just assumed that t-r-e-e was somehow logically linked to a tree—were just made up, arbitrary, random. It’s fascinating and it’s exciting, but if you really think about it, it also hurts your brain and shakes up your worldview a little bit.
That, my friends, is why not everybody wants a college education. Not everybody is willing to submit their worldview to questioning and shaking up and expansion through torturous exercises. Watching the cartoon network and drinking milkshakes is much more comfortable. If this were easy, everyone would do it. It’s not, so here we are, suffering and sweating it out at the end of the semester.
And of course, life doesn’t stop in order to give you four years to focus on expanding your knowledge. If only it did. Lots of things happen that change your life and threaten to push education out of its spot at the top of your priority list. It’s a struggle to keep it there; it’s never as simple as just reminding yourself that “education is important.” But the fact is, for folks like you, it is. Because you’re the folks who are going to (I know, I know, here she goes with “the children are our future”) go back into high schools and say “it’s not good enough” to give kids busywork and make them take standardized tests once a year. And, well, you might want to straighten out a really messed up economy, do something about climate change, and bring about world peace. Most of all, though, you’re going to need to find a niche for yourself, a role that you want to play in the world, one that you find fulfilling. My grandfather was a typist for 35 years—for eight hours a day, five days a week, for 35 years, he typed. He made decent money and got a great retirement plan and was a happy, wonderful man who found his fulfillment outside of work. The thing is, if he’d had what you all have—the intellectual substance I’ve seen in your writing--he would have gone postal in that job. I’m not saying he was dumb. He wasn’t; he was simply more of an action-guy than a thinker. Y’all may be action people, too, but you’re definitely thinkers. Although you could quit school any time and get a job as a typist, I would guess that you wouldn’t find a whole lot of fulfillment there. I suspect that in order to be satisfied, you need something that is available to college graduates.
All of that is to say, don’t give up. Ask for help. When you screw up, be nice to yourself about it. And most of all, remember that no matter what happens, three weeks from today you will be able to lie on the couch, watch cartoon network, and drink milkshakes all day.
I can’t believe you’re still reading. You should go study for finals or something.
Very best,
Laura
