i hate you, school
until december i am pretty much all about the adult education. looking back now from the 3rd year adult ed courses i’m taking this semester i feel as though i might have been spared a ton of personal agony if i had known “then” (september of ’07) what i know now. while there is a lot i don’t like about learning theory (gross oversimplification and the tendency to turn tools into traits) i do think it’s useful for normalising our personal crises by pointing to a trend. what makes the bad times so gosh darn bad is that we’re in them alone. finding out we’re not alone, that others have gone through similar self-torment, takes some of the pressure off and can let us rest at night with a little let’s wait and see attitude.
last night i was on the skype with my pal elizabeth who has recently started her mlis at a new uni some 4000+ kms from her home. a lot of what she described to me paralleled my own return to college to start my tech diploma just over two years ago: frustrated, let down by the school and/or curriculum, torn away from my real life/community and yet isolated from the people at school. i commiserated heartedly with my buddy, reminiscing on how i took up smoking and anger management therapy in my first semester, and chided her to hang in there (even if it’s only by the skin of your teeth!). i’ve talked a lot (with myself mostly) about what going back to college meant for me: it meant giving up all of my community and a somewhat solid way of life i was used to, isolating myself in the suburbs, loosing my partner along with all our former plans together, and finding myself a political minority of one in my new surrounds. a few brief comments at a lecture last saturday morning gave me a more general spin on what i went through, and what elizabeth and tons of other people i’ve met are going through now: as an adult returning to university you are giving up your power. now that you have taken time away from school (probably thought you were done, didn’t you?) and developed a life, you feel you know a little more about who you are. you probably have some labels that you feel apply to yourself, whether they are mother, anarchist, or nurse, and attached to those labels are more complex descriptions and expectations. also inherent in these labels is a kind of niche — even if it feels precarious, you have some idea where you stand within your world. the return to university can mean being thrown into a confusing factory of “education” for which you have no frame of reference. i certainly caught myself staring agape at my classmates when i first returned wondering, who the fuck are these people, and where do they come from?!?. i felt like i’d have been more at home in the zoo.
there are so many unspoken and unwritten assumptions that require specific cultural and class knowledge to navigate. there is a whole new standard of how to talk to people, what’s within the “normal” sphere of conversation, and what constitutes an acceptable personal history. returning to university really did mean giving up the established norm of my life and having to struggle for all i was worth to find a compromise that didn’t actually compromise my self. meaning, i had to do a whole lot of deep thinking about what was really important to me and what was just a lot of established patterns i associated with my self-concept. like i said, deep thinking.
all my adult learning kick may get a little more experimentation time as i’m in the midst of convincing the library faculty that all would benefit from having me on for virtual reference. kind of like their very own askaway/it-helpdesk, but only on sunday nights. i’m looking forward to coming face-to-screen with the frustrations of first year uni all over again…
