My first semester in college was so long ago that I wouldn't bristle at people making wisecracks about me taking notes then by drawing on cave walls. Here's some real context though: when I first went to college it was so affordable that a student could work and pay for it him or herself. I mean pay for all of it. No, really!
Those were truly magical times.
Because we could do both back then, it wasn't unusual for students to meander a bit on the way to a bachelor's degree. Of all the friends and acquaintances of mine who finished college back then, only a handful finished in four years. I went to school full time and worked for the first year and a half. After that, I kept working full time and going to school part time, knowing that I'd get to the degree at some point.
The reason I was in no hurry is because I got a real estate license and was making pretty decent money. It not only paid for school, it removed any sense of academic urgency that I might have. Around that same time, I started doing stand-up comedy which, put mildly, was not a boon for my study habits.
It was the 1980s, so my timeline recollections are a little fuzzy, but I began getting on stage a lot, working full time, and going to school part time. Not surprisingly, school suffered the most in that mix. While it was wonderful to easily afford paying for my own education, it also removed any guilt when my grades suffered. It's not like I was going to threaten to cut myself off.
All of this was happening while there was a comedy boom going on. Local gigs were everywhere, even in Tucson — I frequently got up on stage six times a week. Then I started doing shows up in Phoenix, which really made me think about going on the road. The itch and the opportunity were both overwhelming, so I decided to do it. I told my mom that I would give it a year and if it didn't work out I'd go back to real estate and college.
Well, that one year turned into 30 or so, and as soon as I realized it was for real I made myself a promise: I would one day go back to school and finish my degree.
There have been different timelines throughout the years regarding when I might accomplish that. The one that I thought I'd be able to do was to finish college before my daughter did. She graduated from law school two years ago. Oops.
When I moved back to Tucson several years ago I found myself living five blocks from a Pima Community College satellite campus. When I went to Pima for my first year of college, it didn't have satellite campuses. Then I found out that Pima offered half off tuition for people of a certain age, and I figured that I would knock out as many classes as I could there before returning to the University of Arizona to finish my degree. That triumphant return was greatly slowed down by the Wuhan Chinese Bat Flu pandemic.
It was further slowed down by the fact that Pima couldn't figure out the transcripts for the classes that I had taken there my freshman year because they were on microfiche. Try explaining microfiche to a kid from the 21st century who's working in the registrar's office. After a long time of that embarrassment, they finally told me to enroll in just one class, and here I am.
We finally started figuring out the credits situation. I'd gone back to school for a while 20 years ago at Santa Monica College and, fortunately, those credits were all still good. The stuff from the 20th century, not so much. "Intro to Computers" is a bit different now than it was when Ronald Reagan was president. I did get the registrar to forward my Freshman Composition credits because I'm a writer.
When I went back to school 20 years ago, I still had some common frames of reference with my fellow students. Now my classmates are significantly younger than my daughter. They were all born after 9/11. I don't stick out like a sore thumb in this class; I stick out like a giraffe neck on a chihuahua.
I thought that there might be more non-traditional, older students, but this is a small campus and, "Tag," I'm it. At first, the kids in the class were a little freaked out by my presence, like they thought they might get arthritis cooties or something from me. Several of them warmed up to me rather quickly, however. We do a lot of small group discussions in class and I can make people of any age laugh, so it's been pretty smooth sailing.
It's a Developmental Psychology class, which has led to some interesting chats with my classmates. Last week, I paired up with a 20-something female classmate to discuss relationships past and present. We had never interacted before, so I led with, "This should be awkward." She informed me that she was a bartender and quite used to talking about relationships with people of all ages.
Thank you, alcohol.
It's been a wild journey so far. Everything is online, but I'm used to working in a virtual environment. A lot of the kids use their laptops or tablets in class, but I was very relieved to see that most still kicked it old school and took notes in actual notebooks.
When people find out I'm back in college, I'm met with a lot of aggressive and somewhat negative, "Why would you do that?" types of responses. Or they ask what I'm going to do with my degree. NOTHING, I already have a career. I've always just loved school. Most people are mystified by that.
Show me on the doll where college hurt you.
I'm excited about all of this. I've been pleasantly surprised by the lack of woke insanity thus far. Yeah, a little creeps into the curriculum, but the kids seem pretty level-headed for the most part. The good students are apparently too busy studying to waste time protesting or acting like idiots on social media.
I really am learning a lot in this class.
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