Knowledge Is Power

I’ve let the ol’ Post Irony get a little stale the past couple of months, but I’ve got a reason for that: I’ve gone back to school. It’s something I never thought I’d do. I was never a good student to put it mildly. Starting way back in elementary school, I understood that I would have to be educated to get anywhere in life, but my goal was always to do just enough to get by. I found early on that I was smart enough to just get by without even trying. In some classes, I even made A’s and B’s without intending to. Other classes, usually math or something with a heavy math component, needed actual study to do well, which I wasn’t prepared to do. When I was in the eighth or ninth grade, my parents sat me down and told me they were giving up. It was apparent that I was going to do well in the classes in which I wanted to and do very poorly in other classes. No amount of grounding or taking my TV away was going to change that. I remember being quite relieved that I had outlasted them. That all carried over into college. Luckily, after a lost couple of years I discovered journalism, in which I was able to maintain a B average without much effort. It only took 6.5 years, but I got a degree from a tiny state college in Kansas.

I matriculated at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway back in June with the intention of getting another bachelor’s degree, this time in environmental science. For those who don’t know, the newspaper game is in a serious state of flux. As in all hell has broken loose and there’s no telling how it will all shake out. Since my only marketable skills are newspaper related, that flux put me in something of a bind. The stay-at-home-dad experiment has given me ample time to ponder my future, and the inescapable conclusion is that there is a good chance there won’t be any newspapers to employ me when the STAHDE ends. I’m very lucky in that I’m in position to have Gina support me while I go to school full time. (Actually, Gina’s been supporting me for our entire marriage. Accountancy pays much better than journalism.) And it fits with the STAHDE. Abby will only have to be in daycare for about half a day and by the time I finish in two years, she’ll be off to real school.

So I figured I better get started realigning my skill set immediately because it might take awhile. The only problem was I love writing and editing and newspapering in general. I hadn’t a real clue as to what I might want my new career to be. I knew I needed a couple things: 1. The new career needed to be something I’d enjoy or I’d never get through the schooling part, and B. the new career should include a minimum of math. I eventually came across the environmental science program at UCA, which has a few things going for it for me. To wit, I like science, it requires only one math class and, because environmental issues will continue to grow, it seems as if it won’t peter out on me like the newspaper biz did. I only have a semi-vague idea of the job opportunities and salary available with an environmental science degree, but it won’t take much to beat journalism. If journalism isn’t the lowest paying career with the least benefits and the crappiest hours of all jobs for which a college degree is required, it’s very close.

As luck would have it with my aversion and ineptitude in the realm of mathematics, I started the first summer session in June by taking Statistics. I got started so late that I didn’t have many options and I figured Statistics would test my commitment to returning to school. Of course, I felt like a jackass in the class because everyone in there is half my age. And the teacher was always using examples involving the average age of the class being somewhere between 18 and 22. I was a definite outlier. (That’s some statistics talk for you.)

The class lasted five weeks and it was actually quite easy. But then I’m all ate up with that nontraditional student attitude. From the start I expected to ace every test. After all, in the working world if you only get 85 percent of your job right, someone is giong to want to know why you didn’t get it all right. To that end I did something that would have been completely foreign to me 20 years ago: I studied. Now, I suspect that because this class is a requirement for most majors, it’s dumbed down so students don’t have problems graduating due to a math class they’ll never use. And it’s UCA and not Harvard. But that being said, I made high A’s on every test and I aced the final. It stunned me every time the teacher announced the average score of the tests, always in the mid 70s.

I’m currently in the last week of the second summer session taking Urban and Regional Planning. It’s easy, too. I’ve made A’s on all the tests so far with only the final remaining.

Want to do something fun so you can play along with me? (This only works if you have some college and it’s been awhile since your schooling.) Get a copy of your transcripts. Mine showed three classes I have no recollection of taking. I didn’t remember taking photojournalism three times, dropping it once, flunking it once and making a B the last time. I could see when I decided enough was enough and I had to get finished. I completed 19 hours my last spring semester and then took two classes that summer and only had one class left in the fall.