My educational experience was somewhat checkered. I was not a
good student in the study-hard, take-things-seriously,
someday-you’ll-be-needing-a-job sense like so many students are
today. I got the distinct impression from more than one of my
teachers that he or she believed I had less chance of
post-scholastic success than a hobbit in the NBA.
My educational experience was somewhat checkered. I was not a good student in the study-hard, take-things-seriously, someday-you’ll-be-needing-a-job sense like so many students are today. I got the distinct impression from more than one of my teachers that he or she believed I had less chance of post-scholastic success than a hobbit in the NBA. The extent to which I fooled them is entirely explained by the fact, which I discovered early on, that it is far better to lack the stomach for studying and have a knack for testing well than the other way around.
Mostly school seemed to float by in a soft haze, with some information forcing its way into my head and sticking, and other stuff kind of bouncing off like billiard balls from a green felt cushion. As there was no rhyme or reason why a particular item stuck or bounced, I have been left with a rather eclectic and highly unorganized internal database. Arcane trivia is my meat and potatoes; a lot of the big stuff, well, I have to look it up. As my daughter is proud to proclaim, ”If it’s not worth knowing, my dad knows it.”
Some of my schooling played a role in my lifelong perplexity about the world. For example, when I was in college everyone had a ”second language requirement” to graduate. As it was a large school with language classes being taught all day they assigned you to a class by a lottery system. Consistent with my reputation as the world’s worst gambler, I had the misfortune to draw an 8 a.m. class five days a week for two straight terms.
Now, this was college, get it? – college in the late sixties at Berkeley. What it meant for me was that for six months at the crack of dawn I would stumble into class on autopilot after way too little sleep, the soothing sound of Jimi Hendrix or the Grateful Dead still ringing in my ears, praying that the coffee would kick in soon, and upon achieving rudimentary consciousness would find myself among a crowd of people all of whom were inexplicably speaking German. This was repeated day after day, over and over again, like the Nexium commercial from Hell.
I tried communicating with them in the only language I actually speak. I remember on numerous occasions explaining that I was a stranger in their land who had somehow gotten catastrophically lost while returning to my apartment from Telegraph Avenue and could they direct me to the nearest American Consulate? Nothing helped, although in the painful course of attempting to commence a dialog with the indigenous population I managed to pick up a little German, which has come in handy at least as often as the stuff I learned in my other classes.
The experience left me with a deeply disoriented feeling, which still causes me to have Teutonic flashbacks whenever someone says Gesundheit or pronounces ”Volkswagen” the way it’s supposed to be pronounced. In fact, I believe I acquired Post-Germanic Stress Syndrome, which would have entitled me to some sort of cash benefits if it happened today, but back then the concept of ”everybody’s damaged, everybody should be compensated” hadn’t been fully developed.
The bottom line is, learning is critical, and these days everyone needs it more than ever. Just don’t let your education get in the way. Otherwise you too may cringe in fear every time you hear somebody sneeze.
