[Today’s run: 3.5 miles]
In about two weeks we hope to be attending #1 son’s graduation from college with a B.A. degree.
I enjoyed my college years. I did a year at a small Christian school in Arkansas then four more at Iowa State. Not being very enamored with my major field, I went back for another year to get a Bachelor in my minor field also.
While at Iowa State I enjoyed working at the university post office. Then I got a job with a physics research group. I got to fill up big floor-standing thermos bottles with liquid nitrogen. And I played with computers and generally had a good time. I liked a lot of my classes; some I didn’t like. I lived with a roommate in near-campus housing most of the time and then for awhile in a lonely farm house on the windswept prairie.
I enjoyed the church group I hung around with. They put up with me OK. I always have my moments of acting like a jerk, but somehow it didn’t scare them all away.
While my kids were growing up they complained about high school. Neither one of them liked the school in our town and both escaped early and got GEDs instead of following the regular track. They tell me there were a lot of drug problems in the school. So my wife and I would talk up College. “College is different”, we would say.
But college really didn’t work out so well either. My parents were the first of their families (I’m pretty sure) who graduated from college. Their children, my generation, there were four of us and I think we ended up with 8 degrees between us. And for the next generation, college just hasn’t clicked. I think some of it, maybe a lot of it, is the tremendous expense involved.
And some is probably that the insipid nature of high school has crept up into the college scene. The very things my kids hated about high school: pointless classes, political correctness, social politics, just make it less about learning and more about surviving.
But #1 Son has survived and is closing in on graduation and I’m so happy for him! He’s been accepted to graduate school (which means he likes it enough to keep going). So maybe a bit of what I enjoyed in my 6 years of college he’s started to enjoy in the last year or two.
I think maybe my generation hit a sweet spot: 1950’s parents with faith in education, college was not too expensive, and not yet overly corrupted with marxist theory and gender/race studies.
Three cheers for #1 son!