From: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org (stillpt-digest) To: stillpt-digest@smoe.org Subject: stillpt-digest V2 #158 Reply-To: stillpt@smoe.org Sender: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk stillpt-digest Saturday, July 22 2000 Volume 02 : Number 158 Today's Subjects: ----------------- College (formerly Guy Gavriel Kay Disease, formerly The DeLint Factor) ["] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2000 07:02:19 -0500 From: "Jennifer Stevenson" Subject: College (formerly Guy Gavriel Kay Disease, formerly The DeLint Factor) David writes, >Not to deny the validity of your reactions, but this is the conventional attitude. Everybody, it seems, says that. It makes me feel like some kind of inhuman alien to admit that I find many of my classes engrossing and valuable, that I enjoyed many of them, that I spent a lot of my time thinking about schoolwork and things that came up as a result of this. > Um, David, you're over 20. It's different for grownups. I did my graduate school work at what amounted to a night school--Meredith may know Southern Connecticut State College, er, University or whatever grandiose name they now have. Used to be New Haven Teacher's College, though not in my day. Most of my classmates were adults, married with kids, with jobs, the whole monkeynut, and we were hard-working, focused, excited about our classes, and utterly uninterested in extracurricular stuff. Too damn' busy. In a way it hamstrung us, because compared with my husband's grad school experience, which was a more conventional extension of undergrad (no jobs no kids no external life), we got cheated. 9/10 of the good stuff in grad school is taught by students to each other, even that which is course related. My husband's grad school class was composed of a similarly adult group--few of them had not taken a year or a decade off before coming back. But that's the price of night school vs. real grad school. Even so, grad school is serious shit. Kissinger's Law applies. ("Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.") Nothing compares with college as she is wrote of, where you don't have to cook or clean for yourself, the coursework is routine, and you have unlimited free time in which to enjoy explosive self-invention. And Mom and Dad pay for it. My husband's undergraduate college experience was like yours, though he was the regulation 18 years old and did it the normal way. Well, almost normal--HE was paying for it! That probably added significantly to his workaholism in school. - -Jennifer ------------------------------ End of stillpt-digest V2 #158 *****************************