Tag Archives: College

A semester at sea

When I was in college I spent a semester at sea. I thought it would launch me into the fields of like marine biology and aquatics and stuff. I imagined myself really learning the nuts and bolts of life out on the open ocean, but it wasn’t anything like I had expected. Nothing I could have read or studied would have helped prepare me for the challenges of living on a boat.

semester at sea

Like, for example, I thought that there’d be like a big disembarking, like a “Bon voyage!” type of farewell. But no, they kept us in this stupid inflatable room on campus inside the Olympic sized swimming pool for two days straight. “What’s the point of this?” we all asked, “When do we get to go out to sea?”

The faculty explained that they were giving us a couple of days in a controlled environment to develop our sea legs. I told them that this was unnecessary, that I’d been on a boat several times. I was lying, of course, but come on, people have been travelling on boats for forever. Do you think that the pilgrims who crossed the Atlantic were forced to sit on some glorified pool toy for two days straight?

The worst part was that the swim team still had practice. The inflatable only took up like three lanes, so we had to just sit there and watch them all staring at us like this was the stupidest thing anybody could have ever decided to come to college and actually pay to do.

I was just about to give up, thinking about all of the regular classes that I’d have to sign up for after I backed out of the whole semester at sea, but one of my classmates, or shipmates, or potential shipmates, he backed out. I thought to myself, what a wimp, I can’t believe he quit. And then I realized how ridiculous I sounded, criticizing this guy for a decision that I was just about to make, so I doubled down on my commitment. I was going to earn those sea legs.

We finally made it to the boat and everything was just, again, not at all how I had imagined it to be, certainly nothing like the brochures from the student center made it out to be. I was pretty sure I’d have a roommate. One roommate. Not three. And I hesitate to even call them roommates, because it was hardly a room that we were forced to share.

These guys were a bunch of total nerds. Everybody had the same pair of knee high rubber boots from the first day, I was like, “Guys, what did your moms all go shopping at the same boat store?” and I turned to the first mate, he was checking us all in, and that guy was a huge nerd too, he hadn’t even cracked a smile. One of the nerds was like, “These are the boots they told us to buy. You don’t have any?”

And I don’t know how it was possible that I was accepted into this program, how they let me sit on that tube in the pool for two days, but nobody sent me like a checklist of stuff to buy. “They sent it to our campus email,” one of the dorks said, but I didn’t even bother replying, I never set up my campus email. I was still using my AOL email at the time, I’m not going to bother sharing my old screen name, but it was something lame, childish, you know, I can say that looking back now. Fine, it was SpleenHarvester6834. I don’t know. I thought it was badass at the time. I think I just saw the Hellraiser movies or something.

So I was totally underprepared without the waterproof shoes. But that’s OK, because I bought this pack of novelty eye patches and pirate swords from a party goods store. “Come on mateys!” I passed around the plastic trinkets, nobody took any, what a bunch of weirdoes, seriously, you’re going to spend a whole three months on a boat out on the open ocean and you don’t want to have even the slightest bit of fun?

And that’s what it was, three months of no fun, of performing a bunch of boring calculations. All of the ship’s work was mostly done automatically and, I guess reading the brochures would have helped, but it was all just lab work, just pointing stuff at the sky and taking seawater samples and eating this disgusting packaged food. I didn’t have a cell phone yet, so it didn’t matter that there wasn’t any service, but no TV, just a deck of cards that I brought that got wet with sea spray almost immediately after I busted them out.

I didn’t do anything, not that it mattered, you pay the price for a semester at sea and you don’t do any work, apparently the price tag has an included C+ minimum grade. I’ve never since spoken to any of my shipmates. It’s like, you know when Facebook came out and all of the sudden you start reconnecting with kids you went to Kindergarten with? There was nothing from any of those guys. Maybe they’re all back at sea, back at the open water, who knows, bunch of nerds, I bet you they have no idea what Facebook is. Still, I always find it strange that there’s basically no digital record I ever even boarded the ship.

The absolute worst part was, while I didn’t have any seasickness at all while on board, as soon as I touched dry land again, I started to feel the waves. After a couple of weeks I went to the doctor and he diagnosed me with Phantom Wave Syndrome, something about the brain and waves and, I have no idea, but everything’s always a little wobbly. I asked him, besides medication, is there any relief? “Well,” he told me, “You could always get back out there, back out to sea, I’m sure you wouldn’t feel anything if you were back on a boat.”

But fuck that, fuck the sea, fuck marine biology. I put my heart and soul into the water and it just sank, like it was encased in a cement defibrillator, a whole big vast ocean of nothing.

The professor is a computer program

This week, two articles in the newspaper caught my eye. The first one looked at new programs that would allow computers to instantly grade written essays at a collegiate level. The second one dealt with cutting edge software that would be able to track exactly how much reading students were actually doing for their classes.

It seems to me like education is heading in a terrible direction. Computers to grade tests? Computers to make sure we’re doing our reading? Let’s look at where we’re currently at in terms of higher education. Everybody is expected to go to college. Colleges cost ridiculous amounts of money. High school graduates are pressured at eighteen years old to decide where they’d like to spend the next four years, how they’d like to secure the ridiculous amounts of money necessary to finance such an education, and then the next ten or twenty years after that figuring out what they’re supposed to do to pay it all off.

It’s not worth it now, and it’s going to be worth even less if computers are doing the majority of a professor’s work. Don’t get me wrong; I’m a big believer in a liberal arts education. Everything I learned in college, while it didn’t necessarily lead me to a successful career, it was instrumental in what I know, my views on the world. I learned how to write. I learned critical thinking, new ideas, differing opinions. That kind of stuff is essential.

But come on, my college bill was something like forty grand a year. What are you really spending your money on? Education. How do you get that? Classes. What are the classes like? For me, classes began as this huge rush at the end of a semester to register for classes for the next semester. Everything booked up very quickly. You were lucky if you secured half of the courses that you actually wanted to take.

And then you got in a class and it was like forty students for every professor. And that wasn’t even counting the first two years, when we were expected to take all of the core curriculum, taught not by real professors, but by grad students. To me, the whole process seems like a huge joke. The amount of time spent in class is a fraction of time spent in class during high school. I always say this, but am I the only one who thought that high school was significantly harder than college? I put in half the time and work that I did four years prior and I wound up doing great.

Which brings me back to my original point. Everybody is paying this ridiculously steep price for a college diploma, and what are we really getting? A few hours a week of class. Office hours with the professor. It’s all absurd. And now they want to make computers in charge of grading written work, of charting progress with the class texts?

By the way, none of the class textbooks are included in the cost of tuition. Oh yeah and maybe half of your classes have lab fees. Who do you think is going to be paying for the grading software? Is it going to be included in bill or will it be a little addition tacked on to the invoice?

In making the case for computerized grading, proponents claim that it will, “free up professors for other tasks.” What other tasks? You’re supposed to be grading. You’re supposed to be looking at what students write and figuring out if they’re really getting it. But teaching classes is really only a minor role for most professors. They have to do their own work, their own research and writing. Which is fine, but maybe the universities can use some of that forty thousand dollars per student to hire more professors, give them less work, smaller classes, more time to spend balancing their writing and their teaching.

I just feel like the whole system is so disorganized, so kind of cobbled together in any way to maximize the number of students able to fit on a campus. Which wouldn’t be a big deal if it weren’t for the cost of tuition. These software advances seem to me a blatant attempt to churn out curriculums, to make grading part of an assembly line, with us graduates the finished products. Here’s your grade. Here’s your diploma. Here’s your debt. Next!

Free Association

I always wanted to try a free association. To just get one word out and talk about immediately what comes to mind, and then what comes to mind from that, and so on. But I can never think about the starting point. Like what’s the first word going to be? I guess I could just pick anything, but it wouldn’t really be a free association, it would be forced, somewhat planned.

I’ll just say anything. Cars. Cars make me think of going fast. Of speeding. I’m thinking about my poor driving record. One time I got four speeding tickets in a month. It was terrible. I went to the court date for the first ticket to try and weasel my way out of the fine. I waited in the courthouse for a while until the prosecutor offered me a plea bargain: half the points, half the fine. No way, I told him. I wanted to argue this one out. The judge heard my case and then banged his gavel. Full points, full fine. “Hey wait a second, is it too late for that plea bargain?” “Yes.” Another gavel bang. “Do you really have to bang that gavel every time you finish a sentence?”

He didn’t really bang it after every sentence, but that would’ve been funny. If I were a judge that’s what I would do. I’d bang it constantly. I’d interrupt constantly. A judge’s power is totally unchecked, right? All of the groveling, all of the pleading, “Your honor,” this, “Your excellency,” that. Here you go your honor, a special judge costume and a special judge hammer. No go ahead and feel free to serve as long as you like your honor, nobody else wants to be judge. You take as much time as you want.

I remember one time I drove to Canada and I stopped right before the border to grab a sandwich or something. In a used car lot right next to the sandwich shop there was this old American muscle car for sale called “The Judge.” I knew it was called the judge because it was labeled on the back, “The Judge.” I wanted it so bad, right then and there. If I had the money at that moment there wouldn’t have been anything that could’ve stopped me. That’s why I always worry about my impulses and my decision making processes. Because even though ninety percent of the time I might have a pretty level head on my shoulders, every once in a while I’ll see something like The Judge and the next thing I know I’ll be in this random car dealership in Canada, asking them if they’d take my 2002 Hyundai Accent for an even trade, not thinking at all about insurance, not thinking at all about gas. All I’d think about is feeling fantastic.

My grandmother is a Canadian. I always felt like I’m a kindred spirit with our neighbors to the north. What is national identity? What does it mean to be American or Canadian? Canada is a different country, but what does that even mean? I live closer to the Canadian border than I do to Texas, and I definitely feel like I have a lot more in common with someone living in Montreal than someone who lives in Dallas. One part of me says it’s crazy to have a country as big as the United States, that there’s no way we can really share a national identity, that there’s too much keeping us apart, cultures, food, religion. But then another part of me argues that shouldn’t all of humanity be able to unite behind some sort of universal identity? Like we’re all human, we’re all going through the same life, let’s unite behind that.

But even though there’s me in New York, Canadians up North, and people far away in Texas, collectively, we all have tons more in common than people living in Afghanistan, drone strikes and jihad and deserts and tribes. But it can’t just be geography. There are people right here in New York, homeless people and rich people that are living wildly different experiences than mine.

One time in college I had this idea to dress up like a homeless person, beg for change for a whole day and then write an article about it for the newspaper. So I grew out a ridiculous beard and got ready, but I never followed through. Part of it was people telling me that I was crazy. Another part of it was stories I heard about the NYPD just picking up homeless people and dropping them off in homeless shelters. I also got a weird idea in my head that I might accidentally beg on some more established homeless person’s turf, and they might get confrontational. And also I get really lazy, and I wasn’t the most dedicated college student, and so I probably thought about sitting outside for the whole day and got discouraged by how bored I’d get. So I shaved my beard and walked around with a crazy mustache for a week or so, getting laughs, taking stupid pictures of myself.

I always think to myself that if I were in college now I’d take it much more seriously. But I’d probably do it the same, spending way too much time hanging out with my friends and not enough time in the library. College is this weird place where you’re supposed to study and learn stuff, but you’re only in class like twelve hours a week. I thought that college was much easier than high school. I put a fraction of the work and effort in and I got about the same grades that I did four years earlier. I mean, I’m not running my own company or anything, but I did fine. Good enough. Gave it the old college try.

We’d play this game called Edward Forty-Hands. I wrote about this already I think, but the idea was to tape two forty-ounce beers to your hands and drink them both before you could ask to have the bottles removed, so you could pee, because that’s a lot of liquid, and it’s really just you vs. your bladder with the clock as a referee. We also played this game called Power Hour where you’d set a timer and everybody drank a shot of beer every sixty seconds for an hour. It doesn’t sound like a lot but, think about it, you’d wind up drinking like six beers in an hour. In college I also drank whole beers out of a funnel.

I think it’s so funny that the drinking age is twenty-one yet parents across the country send their kids to go live away at schools where all they do is drink. It’s a big joke. Somebody thought, “I know, we’ll just up the drinking age. That’ll stop them. Those idiot kids.” But you can still buy a gun. Or smoke cigarettes. Or vote. Just no drinking. Yeah. Great idea leaders of society.

So how are you supposed to stop a free association? I feel like I could go on forever. Getting started was hard, sure, but I think shutting myself up is going to prove to be even harder. Where did I start, cars? That’s crazy. I don’t know how to end it. Oh man, I’m looking back and I just realized that I missed a perfect opportunity to wrap things up, full circle, when I was talking about drinking age and smoking age. I could have mentioned driving age, and it would have connected with cars. And I could’ve concluded that I let my mind wander and not only did I bring it right back to where I started, but I did it in exactly the amount of words that I usually use to write a blog post. That would’ve been a good ending.

I used to be really sick at math

Man, I used to be so good at math. Like really good at math. When I was in grammar school, math was always my best subject, easily. I’d always get ridiculously good grades on all of my tests. I went to a K-8 school, and when graduation came around, they did this award ceremony where they gave out medals to all of the kids who did the best in each subject. There was this one girl who was a total genius and won the award for every single subject. Except for math. That was all mine.

It didn’t stop there. When I went to high school, they bumped me up a year, so I was taking sophomore math as a freshman. That year was geometry. What a total joke. I remember one time I got an 80 on one of my tests, but it was only because I finished the test early, like I always did, and by this point in the year, I was already acing like every one of my geometry tests, so while I used to finish up the test early and then go back and recheck everything to make sure I had it all right, I stopped rechecking, because I always wound up getting everything right on the first try anyway. But this test I flew through even faster than usual, but whatever, I handed it in and put my head on my desk and waited for the bell to ring. And I got it back the next day, and it was an 80. And I’m just, “What the fuck?” And I started frantically leafing through the test and I saw that, while I was taking the test, I must have flipped two pages instead of one, like they must have been fresh out of the Xerox machine, and they were just clung together, and I missed a whole page of the test. Just blank. And I went immediately to the teacher and I was like, “Come on! I obviously didn’t see this page! It’s not fair! I get a 100 on every single test!” And he’s just like, “Well, sorry. You have to double check.” That asshole. I’ll never forget it. One day I’m going to run into him on the street and I’ll tell him … no wait, even better, one day I’m going to get a job somewhere and it’s going to be a leadership position and I’ll find out that I’m this guy’s boss now, and everything that he does, I’m going to give him a grade for it. And you know what that grade’s going to be? 80. And then I’m going to fire him.

Sophomore year I took trigonometry. Whereas the geometry teacher was a total stiff, lacking any semblance of a personality, the trig teacher was almost exactly the same, but he fancied himself a comedian, and so he spiced up the class with these lame jokes, like this thing he called the “touchdown rule.” Basically, every class, the last kid to sit down automatically got detention. And he would hold up his hands like a football ref and say in his dry monotone, “touchdooooown.” And that kid would get detention, for real. Everyday. I guess it was a way to make sure everybody was sitting down right away, but yeah, kind of a dick move if you think about it. Still, it was more entertaining than my 80% geometry teacher. I’ll never forgive that hack.

Junior year was the best. Calculus. They made us buy this ridiculous calculator, the TI-89, like it cost two hundred bucks. It was almost like having an iPhone, but iPhone’s didn’t exist yet. This thing had a big screen. It ran applications, you know, what we used to call apps before the iPhone came around. You could play games on it. And it did all of this crazy calculus stuff. I felt like I was a NASA engineer in this class. Seriously, it’s like I’m picturing myself sitting in this class, and there’s a thought balloon over my head, and all you see are crazy equations and Greek letters and I’m just writing and typing shit into my TI-89 in this completely alien language of numbers and symbols. That teacher was awesome. He loved technology. He told us that the calculator out of the box may have cost two hundred bucks, but it was worthless unless we knew how to use it. He would tell us every time he taught us a new function or a new trick, he would say, “I just added ten dollars to the value of that calculator.” And he would keep a running tally, like every time he would say that, he’d write the number down somewhere, so that halfway through the year, he’d teach us something, and he’d say, “And that brings the current value of this calculator for you guys to … two thousand and twenty dollars. Not bad seeing as how you bought it for only two hundred.” And it was true. You could do so much with this TI-89.

And then senior year rolled around and it was time for Calc-2. But this teacher sucked. He told us right away that he hated calculators, and that we’d be learning to do stuff the old-fashioned way, like Archimedes did, or whoever invented calculus. (There’s no way I’m stopping to look it up.) Not only that, but he had this stupid rule in class called the “one-hand rule.” Basically, if he saw anybody using two hands on the calculator at the same time, that person got detention. Why? Well, you needed two hands to play games on it, and so now I couldn’t even blow off some steam mid-class to play a few rounds of Galaga when I got bored. Plus, and this isn’t even really a jab at the teacher, but he suffered from severe migraines, which I’m completely understanding of. I mean, the guy’s sick. Fine. But he missed at least two classes a week. So we really didn’t learn anything new. In fact, I felt like I learned more in Calc-1 than I did in Calc-2. But whatever.

Math. I was so f’n good at it. I could do equations for everything. I went to college, I had no idea what I’d be majoring in, but I knew at least that I’d do great in math. But I registered for classes that summer, and there was a huge problem. I went to this stupid all-boys Catholic high school that prided themselves on being better than every other high school in the galaxy. We didn’t have free periods. We didn’t have senior cut days or a senior parking lot. We didn’t have girls. No, just learning. Stupid, boring, learning. Anyway, the school thought it was above everything. Even above the government. We didn’t take New York State tests, we took our own tests, “harder tests,” they told us, “even harder than the hardest state test in any state in the country.” I did great on those math tests. The problem is, they weren’t recognized by the state. So when I tried to register for Calculus 3 in college, the college registrar was like, “well Rob, there’s absolutely no state record of your having done anything past algebra way back in eighth grade.” And I’m like, “Seriously? Isn’t there something you can do?” And they said, “Yes. We are serious. And no, there isn’t anything we can do.”

And freshman year of college I had to take two consecutive semesters of math. And they put me in this stupid class called “Finite Mathematics 1.” It was such a comedown. Such a fall from grace. Such a cruel twisted joke. I brought my TI-89 to the first class and the professor was passing out these stupid baby calculators, ones that didn’t do anything special, ones that had a little solar strip so they didn’t even work right unless you were either outside or directly under a lamp. Come on. I get calculators like that for free just by opening a checking account.

It was a total joke. It wasn’t even up to the level of 8th grade math. I skipped like every single class, took Finite Math 2, skipped all of those classes too, finished up with my math requirements, and then kicked off the dust from my sandals and said goodbye to math forever. What a shame. I remember my high school junior math teacher, that awesome thousand dollar calculator teacher, he would always tell us, “Listen up boys, I know this stuff because I teach it every year. But if you stop, you’re going to lose it all. Real fast. Use it, or lose it.”

And I never really thought about that, because I was so f’n good at math. I was like fluent at this stuff. But then I remember being maybe a junior or a senior in college, and one of my good college buddies, this guy Dan C., he was a math major. And one time he was working on some problem and I said to him, “Hey Big-C, you mind if I take a crack at it?” And he just laughed, slammed down his TI-105 or whatever model they were up to that year and said, “Go ahead, be my guest.”

And this guy was way past Calc-2. And I just looked at this page of numbers and it all meant absolutely nothing to me. Nothing. So I started asking him about it. And through my questions and his answers, I realized that not only was I not up to his level in math, clearly, but I wasn’t even up to my old level in math. I couldn’t even remember the terms I would use to begin to describe what my level once was. I stared at him in a panic. “Dan! You have to believe me! I used to be so f’n sick at math! I swear!” It was true. I used to take entire math tests consisting of one question. And it would take like an hour to do it. And even if you got it wrong, which was rarely the case for me, the teacher could still go back and check out your work, check out how you got the answer, and see where you were going, and give you a good grade. It was like painting. It was like playing the guitar. I know math is yes or no, numbers and numbers and right and wrong, but this was art. This was something really cool. And I totally lost all of it. I didn’t use it, so I losed it.

It’s crazy because, the whole point of this blog post was supposed to be about how I just got back from a week long vacation, and how I really didn’t get too much writing done while I was away, and I sat down here today for my first day back home, and I got all freaked out, just like the math, what if, because I didn’t use it, my writing, I’d somehow lost it. I was going to make all of these jokes about how since I lost my math, that I never use math now, as a rule, ever. And that would have been a pretty wacky blog post I guess. But man, now I’m all serious, and I’m rarely serious, and it’s all because I wish that I stuck with math, because it was pretty f’n sick.

I was a history major. I’ve told you that already. Here’s the backstory.

Henry David Thoreau once said, “Don’t try to be a great man, just try to be a man.” I think it was Thoreau. Hold on, I’ll check.

OK, I’m a little embarrassed. It wasn’t Thoreau. It was Zephram Cochrane, inventor of the warp engine in Star Trek. Yeah, he’s a fictional character, so I guess I should really be attributing the quote to whatever writer wrote that line for the actor who played Zephram Cochrane. I should, but I’ve already done so much research with the whole Thoreau thing. I can’t do it anymore. Do you know how hard Thoreau is to spell? I had no idea. I knew the name, like how it sounded, but trying to write it down? I’m not going to put up all of my failed attempts here, but let me just tell you, they were all way off.

Whatever, I wasn’t an English major anyway. I was a history major. History is so much more serious than English. Come on. English. What a joke. Besides, everything that happened in an English class happened in the past. In fact, everything studied at any university is something that has already happened. And so, technically, everything is history. And so, to get even more technical, majoring in history is like majoring in everything, because everything is history. Everything, except for the future. But I don’t think my school offered a major in futurology.

At least, I don’t think so. My school had this ridiculous call-in registration thing. I mean like, hello? Has anybody ever heard of the Internet? It was terrible. You had to get up way too early and call this registration hotline. It was busy for like first five or six hours. But you still had to just keep calling. Finally I got through and this robot voice was all like, “Hello! Welcome to class registration!” Whatever I was so bored at this point. And I was pretty sure that all of my classes would have probably been booked by this late in the day because, well, I said that I sat there for five or six hours listening to the busy signal over and over again, but the truth is, I tried like once or twice, got discouraged, and then went outside to play Frisbee or something. College!

So finally I’m on the line and it’s time to pick classes when the robot lady says, “We’re sorry, you cannot register for classes until you select a major.” And I’m just thinking, “Major? What? Already?” And I looked down at my watch, and sure enough, it said “Sophomore year.” And I’m just like, “Oh shit! Sophomore year already?” The robot lady said, “Please state major.” And I didn’t have any time to think. So I said, “Futurology.” I wasn’t sure if that was what it would have been called. Maybe Futurism? Future Studies? I had no way of knowing. Of course I must have said it wrong, either that or such a program never existed (not yet … maybe in the future) because the phone said, “Does not compute. Please restate major.”

And I knew that if I hung up to think about it, I’d have to call back and deal with more potential busy signals and I’d have to walk over to the student center and find someone who worked there and ask for a registration handbook or a course guidebook or something like that, I have no idea. I didn’t even know what I would have been asking for. And the person helping me would give me that look like, “Shouldn’t you have this figured out by now?” And I was just thinking about that happening and I have such a vivid imagination, like I could clearly imagine some university employee saying this to me, so I got pissed and said out loud “Shut up!” and the phone said back, “Does not compute. Please restate major.”

I knew that these computers had a way of just hanging up after so many botched attempts at communicating with humans, so I just said, “Mystery.” I thought this could have gone in a number of directions. I thought, maybe there’s actually a Mystery major. It would be so cool. You’d get to study murder classics and Hitchcock movies and you’d get to play Clue as an elective class. Either that or maybe the computer would take “Mystery” to mean, “Who knows? Surprise me.” And then I’d get a crazy random major, like Quantum Physics, or Hotel Management.

I sat there waiting. The phone didn’t say anything for a while. Then it clicked, “Major selected: History.” And I was just thinking, OK, did it mistake my saying “Mystery” for “History?” Or did it give me a random major, like I was saying before, but it randomly gave me history? I tried to undo it. “Phone!” I shouted into the phone, “Undo major selection!” But the phone said, “Does not compute. Goodbye.”

And there you have it folks. Best mistake of my life. I learned basically everything there is to learn about everything. Up until graduation that is. Since 2006 I haven’t learned anything. About history I mean. I’ve learned plenty of other stuff, like how to buy a wireless router with a built-in password, or how to pretend to be a Jehovah’s Witness, so that way when real Jehovah’s Witnesses come knocking at my door, I can answer and be like, “Sorry everybody, I’m already a JW. Maybe you should go check on my neighbors.” Actually, this didn’t work out how I thought it would either. Because they just started smiling and saying, “Great! Why don’t you come around town with us! Knocking on doors! Handing out pamphlets! The more the merrier!”