Published in The Fauquier Times-Democrat, Weekend Edition, Fri. 6/1/12
Last month, my eldest daughter graduated from college. Both of us wondered when and where those eight semesters went. Everyone tells the student how quickly the education went, but if I recall clearly, that final semester seems interminable for the student herself.
By primary and secondary schooling standards, the time spent on courses in college is stripped to skeletal levels. All the fleshing of time is picked clean off the subject and the class is reduced to the bare bones of lecture, lab, clickers, and exams. In college, the student is expected to flesh out the subject by reading tomes every week. It helps to understand what is read, too, of course. So, no reading when sleep deprived or while intoxicated or while checking text messages and status updates.
Ever notice that the more a student pays for education, the less there seems to be of it? It’s like those fancy dinners that are served on plates with miniscule portions. Many colleges and universities have mind-boggling price tags, yet the students seem to be forever on break. They start school late, end by early December, it seems, and they don’t return to school until the end of January. There has to be the week off at Thanksgiving or in the spring, and by early May, they’re out.
For this, you need only go to school for a mere 16 weeks a semester to complete an entire course. For most classes, you won’t attend class daily, either. Perhaps, you will go to class every other day. Some cheeky students may not attend class at all if there is a liberal attendance policy. Public education at the elementary and middle and high school levels is free for the student, but the students are required to attend. Higher education, of course, is not free. Far from it. Light years away, in fact.
We were in Baltimore to attend the ceremony at Johns Hopkins University where my daughter graduated in electrical engineering. We and many more people than parking spaces flooded that part of the city. It was interesting to watch the procession that began at 8:40 AM from the point of view of the shoes that were donned beneath the uniform gowns. If I had taken the correct camera with me, I could have made a whole mini-commentary based on the shoes chosen for the event. It would have been similar to the ones that fashionable papers sport, showing the various hats chosen for events like Gold Cup. In addition to capturing the triumphant glow on my daughter’s face, her hair that had coiled itself in ringlets in response to the hot and humid morning, I wanted to track which students chose to march in flip-flops, and which ones were planning to spend the next four hours with their feet strapped into clogs or stilettoes.
Instead, when I whipped out “my” camera, I felt its odd lightness in my hands, indicating that it held none of the required AA batteries. I made vile mental commentaries to and about myself. While we could see and shout out at my daughter, I did not capture it with pictures. In this day and age, it practically means it didn’t happen. If you have no pictures, do you have the memories? We have a mile of videotape, the Super 8, but we did not have our stills. I considered befriending another, better prepared, parent to take a picture and then email it to me, but decided to restrain my usual chatty self.
My husband would probably resent this divulgence of improper planning. He would recoil at the breach of privacy this would entail. I had the argument with myself to save my husband the effort and decided that he was right.
Maybe when our eldest decides to do a graduate degree, I will double check my camera for batteries. It would just take a couple of years to do the degree and it would stave off the paying back of student loans for a little while. What’s a couple of years, anyway? It would, undoubtedly, fly by.
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