Reflections on Education

I've been thinking a lot lately how school really isn't cool once you get to adulthood (albeit young adulthood, in my case).

Let's start with a look at elementary school.  It's your first day.  Your mom is taking a picture of you with your little corduroy jumper and Minnie Mouse backpack, and the ground is still wet with morning dew that makes your shoes all wet when you walk through the yard.  Everyone is excited, because you are going to ELEMENTARY SCHOOL.  This is a big deal.  This isn't just preschool anymore.  It's the real deal.

Stylin'

My primary memories from elementary school include the following: playing with a parachute in gym class, watching from a distance as other kids poked sticks into a hole purported to house a snake of some sort, hula hooping in the parking lot, watching Charlotte's Web in the multipurpose room after school, playing bingo for jolly ranchers, and one day cutting off a tiny portion of my hair with school scissors for fun and not telling anyone.  Actually, those are my primary memories from Kindergarten through the second grade.  After third grade, I changed schools...primary memories from those years include watching baby chicks run around a cardboard box, digging for clay at the bottom of the sandbox, accidentally staying out on the playground longer than the rest of my class, and being a Valley Girl in the 5th grade program.  Those were good years.

Then came middle school.  Ah, middle school.  It's your first day.  You're standing at the bus stop at the corner of a neighborhood street, your shoes wet from the morning dew and your black satchel thrown across your shoulder.  You're nervous, but generally excited to be going to a school with lockers and passing times and all the romance of your favorite tween TV show.  But even better, you're away from those little kids: you're going to MIDDLE SCHOOL.  This isn't just elementary school anymore.  It's the real deal.

"Homework"

My primary memories from middle school include the following: making a friend a "birthday cake" out of Hostess Cinnamon Rolls, buying gel pens with quarters at lunch, getting Everlasting Gobstoppers from the vending machine, being embarrassed that I had the shiny purple gym shorts and not the cotton ones that most of the girls had, doing a social studies report on the terra cotta warriors, working on logic puzzles in math class, school dances where more time was spent talking in the commons than dancing, sewing cartoon pillows in FACS class, and the Cha Cha Slide.  Those were also good years.

Then came high school.  Yes...high school.  It's your first day.  You're waiting for the bus on a neighborhood street corner, your shoes wet from the morning dew and your hair already beginning to frizz up.  Your time has come: it's finally time for the context of Boy Meets World to become your personal social context.  High school is a world of football games, real school dances with real fancy dresses, dating, and driving.  This is it.  This is the pinnacle of teenage existence.  This isn't middle school anymore...this is HIGH SCHOOL.  It's the real deal.

Another useless life skill gained

My primary memories from high school include the following: twirling color guard flags behind the building, sweating in the sweltering heat of band camp, hanging out with friends in the cafeteria, the annual "matchmaker" survey (where for just $1 you could receive a statistical report of your best romantic matches in the school), dancing with friends in overpriced dresses in the middle of the school gym, breezing through French class while other students goofed off and subsequently did poorly on exams, early morning chemistry labs, marching band and color guard competitions, and the rotating darkroom door from photography class.

And then it's here...the moment you've been waiting for, the moment you've been working towards.  You've walked across the stage with all the necessary pomp and circumstance, you've bid your friends goodbye.  And suddenly, you're in college.  It's your first day.  You've braved the dorm showers, gotten dressed in a way that best showcases your personal style, you've memorized the room number of your first class, and choked back the homesickness tears that still well up at the most inconvenient times.  You join the throng of students heading out into the sunlight, your shoes shuffling along the concrete behind the sorority girls proudly displaying their letter jerseys.  This is COLLEGE.  It's not high school anymore...this is the real deal.

Enough for you and 10 of your
closest friends

My primary memories of college include the following: joining a sorority (surprising myself and everyone in my family), walking downtown for pizza, taking "study trips" to coffee shops with friends under the full realization that little studying would really be accomplished, formals and costume dances, messing around with coworkers in the foreign language labs, doing my best Broadway actress impersonations at Cabaret every year, singing in the tiny practice rooms in the basement of the fine arts building, having deep conversations over chicken tenders, and ordering cheesesticks that came in pizza boxes too big to fit through a doorway.  These were also the years when I got serious about my faith, which would come to have bigger effects than I could have ever realized.

But then it's graduation.  That darn pomp and circumstance is back.  And this time, it's not as exciting...sure, you're burnt out from your senior seminar papers and ready for a summer break, but you have to say goodbye to some of the best friends you've ever had.  But there's your family, smiling at you from the white chairs that spread out across the lawn as you walk across the stage under the shadow of the Grecian-inspired administration building and gaze out at the city skyline under a cloudless blue sky.  Your shoes don't match the dress you wore under your gown, but you don't care.  Your mom is taking pictures of you in your black cap and gown, holding your newly acquired diploma proudly.  In just a couple hours, you'll be a bawling mess as you move out of your dorm room and, God forbid, turn in your dorm key for the last time.  It's over.

And then you're in the "real world."  This is ADULTHOOD.  This is the real deal.

And this brings me back to my initial claim that school isn't cool once you reach adulthood.

For some reason that seemed good at the time, you've decided to go to graduate school.  After all, you've been through two graduations already...why not tack a third one onto that and become a MASTER of something.  Besides, everyone's talking about how the economy is horrible and no one can find a job...might as well avoid that for a couple years by becoming more qualified for said invisible job, right?  And it is a good idea.  But here's the problem: you don't get to escape the real world just because you go to graduate school.

In Kindergarten through High School,  your education is, essentially, your job.  That is what you spend all your time doing, and that is what is expected of you.  In College, your education truly becomes your life since you're living at your educational institution - the work load is certainly higher, but it's all so intricately interwoven into your everyday that you don't notice.

Good thing you have that coffee, girl.

But graduate school is a horse of a different color.  Education is still your job...but now, you're enough of an adult to realize that your job shouldn't be your whole life.  Yet, somehow, your graduate school "job" is your whole life.  Class is only a small part of the matter...there's the marathon trips to the library, the hundreds of pages of reading per week.  Leaving campus doesn't mean leaving work...it means STARTING work.  That's work that you're not even getting paid for, but that you're PAYING to do.  And oh yeah, because you're now an adult, you have to find time to maintain everything else about your life, like grocery shopping and your paid job and traffic-laden commutes and what have you.  But these things become difficult to accomplish because "work" is consuming your life.

I blame this as the primary reason for graduate school burnout.  As I've been working at my new program-required, yet paid church job, I've become aware of this great sense of satisfaction I have upon leaving work every day.  I feel like I've actually gotten things done...because I have!  I've planned lessons, voiced ideas in meetings, drawn up reports.  I get all sorts of things accomplished, and I get paid to do them, and then I go home and don't do them anymore, except for maybe a couple little things.  If I was always taking huge quantities of work home with me, people would call me a workaholic and tell me to stop.  They would tell me that I'm going to burn myself out, and they'd be right.

But with graduate school, it's basically expected that you will be a workaholic.  I never leave class with the satisfied feeling of having accomplished something...if anything, I feel more overwhelmed than I did when I walked in the door.  My work has only just begun.

And that is why school is not cool once you reach adulthood.  If only my 5-year-old self had known that she'd be doing school for nearly twenty years following, maybe she would have run back inside the house and hidden under her Minnie Mouse backpack.

But still, I'm thankful for my education, and I know it's going to benefit me in the long run and has already benefited me in countless ways.  Still, I hope that my primary memories of graduate school aren't the long hours spent in the library...I hope that they're the Gumbo and a Movie nights with friends, Tex-Mex trips to Chuy's and Fuzzy's, spontaneous trips to Fort Worth, funny stories about my professors.  And happiness.  Above all, happiness.

Still, after I graduate this year...I think that's enough school for me.