What Have We Learned Today?

What have we learned today, children?

• Google's corporate motto is: "Don't be evil."  (Actually learned today in Intro to Radio and Television.)
• Brits have one-act plays in pubs, not live music.
• Travel to “wherever” – it will “broaden your persona.”  Except Mexico.  Don’t go there.
• He needs the e-mail number for hot dates.
• The Jeffersons would not have been accepted in Colonial America due to skin color and ambition.
• Homer existed and all of his stories were true.  We know this thanks to Indiana Jones.
• Transvestites were okay in Colonial America as long as they wore pants.
• Pre-Industrial Revolution British nobles were forever throwing metal fences up, harshing their peasants' mellows.
• Tobacco is actually spelled "tabacco."  And cacao is spelled "cacoa."  Although he might have been trying to write "cocoa," in which case he apparently holds a well-cherished belief that the letter "o" should never be the second letter in a word.
• Salt is bad for you.
• Gandhi wore serapes and was fond of lewd gestures.
• The Poor.
• He will see me Wednesday, but only because he's holding my test hostage.

US History Liveblog #1: 28 Feb 2011

2:50pm – Actual published start-time of class.  He’s not here yet.  So, on the syllabus today it says that we’ll be talking about The American Revolution, but given that we’re about three sections behind where the syllabus says we should be, I think I’ll take that with a grain of salt.

Also, there’s something wrong with this table.  It’s making my laptop sit crooked, so I have to press the heels of my hands on the keyboard area to make it behave and not wiggle like the lopsided table at a bar.

2:55pm – he just came in completely bundled up in his usual outerwear and announced “I hope you’re all enjoying this beautiful weather.”  It looks like he just walked in from Alaska.

He does not have our tests.  Is anybody surprised?  Also, he just found somebody’s cigarette butt right here on the floor in the classroom (WTF?) and put it in his back pocket.  That’s terrifying.  It wasn’t even his.

Now I guess we’re going to talk about the Oscars.  He just said “Did your people win last night?”  What people?  Do we as Americans now own stakes in Oscar nominees?  He has just informed us that Brits have one-act plays in the pubs in England instead of live music.  How perfectly fascinating.  He’s demonstrating a stutter in his description of The King’s Speech.  For two minutes now.  He suggests that everyone should travel to “wherever” because it “broadens your persona.”  Except Mexico.  He says don’t go there.

Well, he almost started class.  Now he’s talking about when he lived in London (apparently when he saw the one-act plays in the pubs) and he once knew a “Shakespeare dude.”  Insert Australian accent here.  Apparently, said “Shakespeare dude” liked to flit betwixt pub and playhouse, drinking pints in between cues.  Them’s the actions of a drunkard right there.

3:04pm – He’s promising us a “broader perspective on the passage of time” and claims that Early American History = “Ancient History.”  He still hasn’t defined what it is we’re going to talk about today.  But he’s giving us clues.  The American Revolution is not to be covered today, sadly.  I figured as much.

3:06pm – Topic still shrouded in mystery.  He just asked a guy in the front row, presumably as an aside, for the “email number for hot dates.”  Since we have yet to “gress,” does this count as a digression?

3:09pm - He just wrote on the board “Moral Economy, Mercantile Capitalism, Imperialism.”  The sad part is, he seems to get stuck on these three ideas repeatedly and he doesn’t appear to be able to do more than describe them.

Apparently we are definitely talking about Moral Economy at the very least.

I’m a little irritated that I came in to class today.  The main reason I did is because I wanted my test back.  Now that I’m not getting it back today, it makes me want to go home.

He’s claiming that people in early America had the right to pay the “just price” or exercise taxation populaire.  I’m going to have to check that one to see if it’s true.  More examples of Moral Economy: sumptuary laws, which he explains thusly: “If I’m a peasant, I’m prohibited to walk down the streets of Philadelphia or Boston or London or Paris with a sword on my belt, because swords are a mark of the aristocracy.”  He just used transvestites as another example of sumptuary law.  Was this a rampant problem in Colonial America?

Charavari.  What the hell is Charavari?  Oh, it’s like Twelfth Night.  He just sang the theme to The Jeffersons.  Apparently, the Jeffersons wouldn’t have been accepted in Colonial America.  Not only because they were black, but because they were upwardly mobile.

He just pronounced New Orleans “New Or-LON.” 

We have just spent the better part of six minutes giving repetitive examples of charavari.  Which is apparently pronounced “chah-ruh-varry.”  Which sounds like a type of beans or something.

I’m actually kind of proud of him.  We’ve made it about 14 minutes without a digression.

I just gave him an example he was asking for so that he would move on.

Aha!  3:22pm – Digression #1!  He’s contradicting himself with regards to the sumptuary law declaration.  Apparently hierarchical society *wasn’t* actually a law.  It was just a tradition.  He’s incorrectly equating marriage contracts and marriage licenses.  Digression within a digression!  He wants to talk about Homer.  Of The Iliad, not Homer Simpson.  He just declared categorically that Homer existed and all his stories were true.  I’m sure that the world of ancient literature owes this man a great boon.  

3:25pm – Digression is over, theoretically.  Oh wait – not so much.  He wants to shoot a rabbit and a deer on his land.  Or wrestle them to the ground.  I’m not sure.

He keeps advancing this theory that there was a common land system in Britain in the 16^th and 17^th centuries.  He claims that there were these great swaths of land that the nobles and landowners just let the peasants use for free, as it was in their best interest to make sure their people weren’t starving and with an eye to be proactive against revolution.  I’m pretty sure that’s not how it went.  He keeps referencing something called the “Enclosure Movement.”  He says that the peasants just woke up one morning and there was a huge metal fence surrounding this previously free land because nobles suddenly decided to grow crops and raise sheep for wool – both to export. 

We’re only about forty minutes in to a 1 ½ hour class, and I’m pretty much done.  Why did I come to class today again?  Oh yeah.  The test that he didn’t give back.

He just spelled “tobacco” – “tabacco.”

Digression #2 – his girlfriend reads nutritional labels.  He does not.

Cacao = “cacoa.”

Apparently, cotton wasn’t that big a deal until after the American Revolution.  I think that would be news to the slaves of the time.  Ditto indigo.

Digression #3 – his friends think salt is bad for you.

All of the cash crops of the 16^th and 17^th centuries were apparently addictive, stimulating appetite suppressants.  This, he suggests, was on purpose, to create demand for their supply.  I’m thinking probably not, given the fact that the science didn’t exist at the time to even make that idea occur to the farmers.  For the love of God, *germs* weren’t even discovered until the 19^th century.

HE JUST CLAIMED THAT BY THE TIME OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, EVERY WORKING CLASS FAMILY HAD TOBACCO AND CHOCOLATE AT THE READY.  It was a normal, everyday staple in both Britain and America.  They’d just throw chocolate bars in with their lunches on the daily.

This is actually getting disheartening, just how far off he is.  It’s a really good thing he doesn’t check attendance, because I can only stomach this about once a week.

Did you know that Gandhi wore serapes?  I wonder if he had a sombrero, too.  And maybe some maracas.  At the very least, castanets.  Also, he liked to flip off the British when nobody was looking.  Gandhi sounds like a pretty cool dude.  Not as much about all that peace shit as I thought.

So far, we have not talked about a single actual event in this class.  We’ve talked about culture and generalities, but not a single actual historical event.

There are thirteen minutes left in this class.  Three people have left already.  I wish I was one of them. 

Digression #4:  I honestly can’t figure out where we’re going here.  He’s talking about guilds and just randomly yelling “The British are coming!  The British are coming!”  But we’re not talking about the American Revolution yet.  Is it because Paul Revere was a silversmith?  What does that have to do with boots?  He has just repeated the exact same three sentences twice in a row.  It’s like the record skipped and restarted.

“And now with the few minutes remaining to us: The Poor.”  We have six minutes to cover an immense global issue.

After that, he trails off to a mumble and then announces “I’ll see you Wednesday!!”  That’s probably true, given that he still has my test to hold over me.  But next Monday?  Maybe not.  Maybe I’ll make my attendance to this class a weekly thing on Wednesdays: the only day I have another class after this one.  While I'm intensely curious about what he's going to come up with next, I'm far less keen on torturing myself twice weekly.

Liveblog FAIL

There was no wifi signal in that classroom!  So, I went ahead and liveWorded it and saved, but then after class, I have to go straight back to my town and pick up my kids and then do the whole Mom thing, which included cleaning the kitchen after the Great Algebra Debacle of February 27th, whence I became to depressed to do anything but sit around and sigh.

Anyway, I'm cleaning up the liveWord edition, because, like the Dude, I lack the whole brevity thing.  I'll post the liveblog and the new also-weekly feature "What Have We Learned Today."

Worst part?  I could have gone home.  He didn't have the tests graded yet.

The US History "Professor" In Question

I just spent 20 minutes wandering around trying to find a damn outlet.  None to be had, so we're on battery power.  I refuse to let that influence this post.  I will not bow to your paltry laws of science and batteries and such.

Before I start my liveblog (for which I will have AC power, thank the Good Lord), I should give you a picture (and some examples) of my US History professor.  I deliberately used quotation marks above because this man tells some amazing stories in my US History I class, and very few of them are actually true.  This class covers America from Pre-Columbus to 1877, which is a random cut-off if you ask me.  Sure, Reconstruction and all that, but it was a hip and happening world in 1877.

First, let me describe the man.  He looks like George Carlin but without the facial hair.  His voice is a dead ringer for Al Pacino's.  He wears dress slacks and either sweaters with button-downs underneath, or just turtleneck sweaters by themselves.  He always, always comes to class bundled up in a coat and with a really long scarf wrapped about thirty times around his neck.  My friend Spidey tends to sit closer to him than I do, but he claims that there is a certain aroma of wine about the man just about every day.  Which explains a lot.  He works blue, as if a plenitude of F-bombs is going to help him connect to the clueless teenagers that sit in front of him twice a week.  He digresses with regularity.

My notes in this class started out serious, because I thought I was in a regular class.  Nevermind the fact that he told us on the first day that he will never take attendance.  And also nevermind that every test is open-book, open-notes and even open-Wiki if you bring a laptop or a smartphone.  (Wiki is more accurate than this man.)  As time went on, I realized it wasn't that he was treating us like adults.  It was that he really did not give a shit.  I used to not write down the digressions and weird things that he said, preferring instead to write what I actually already knew to be true to help me remember when it came to be test time.  Then I realized that I don't really give a shit, either, and it was more entertaining to write down what he was actually saying than any real facts about the nation's history, which clearly I can just get from the book or the Google or whatever on the day of the test.

Some examples taken from my actual notes:

• From February 7th (it did not take me long to start amusing myself with my notes):  "For some reason, he started talking about the Llano Estacado, which he pronounces "Yah-noh Esk-a-tah-doh," and then No Country For Old Men, which he believes was directed by the same guy as Biutiful."
• Also from February 7th:  "He also claims that all North American mustangs derive from a single release of a string of horses in 1680.  Mass generalizations about Native Americans and horsemanship followed, and then a stroll down memory lane where he talked about that one time he rode a horse."
• From February 16th:  "He just pronounced it 'deus ex machine-ah.'"
• Also from February 16th:  "Did you know that all Black Irish descended from fifteen shipwrecked Spaniards?"
• More from February 16th:  "He just claimed that all Spanish settlements were completely homogenous from LA to Buenos Aires."

From misappropriated terms to strange jokes and completely erroneous stories about how we, as a culture, came up with certain idioms and such, he's a real treat as long as I can forget that I'm paying for this class.  Sadly, I don't forget that very often.  Hence the physical tic that tries to keep my eyes from rolling out of my head.

I've gleaned a few key bits of information about this guy from various sources (and by various sources I tend to mean people who sit down next to me at picnic tables and start talking randomly to me - there will be an entire post about that little phenomenon) and I think they're pertinent here: he is a jazz musician and he has a girlfriend from Paris.  The jazz musician-ness explains the clothes.  The French girlfriend makes sense because she probably doesn't know anything about US History and is content to believe his version of it without question.

We have to write a term paper for this class.  It's supposed to be five pages.  In the syllabus he says that we can choose anything in American history until 1877.  Or, you know, a movie you saw once.  Or a book you read.  Anything, really, as long as it's five pages.  You don't even have to have source material.  Sadly, I am not making this up.

Today we get our first tests back.  His tests are five short answers, and then you choose two of four essay questions and expound upon them to your heart's content.  This included such earth-shatterers as "Briefly explain slavery in North America.  Why did such a practice exist?" and "Describe Pre-Columbian Native Americans."

It took everything I had not to respond to the latter with "Oh, you know - not too tall, not too short.  Two eyes, hair.  A nose, a mouth.  Probably some exotic body paint or a fur thrown rakishly over one shoulder."

This class has been sent from God to test my self-restraint.  I know it.

Expect the Unexpected

Normally, I hate that phrase.  I'm a planner, so the unexpected is a hateful, disruptive thing anyway, but I find that phrase in particular trite and annoying.  If a zombie ambled along one day on the street, would you stop and say to yourself, "Well, that's unexpected.  But I expected the unexpected."  No, you would not.  You would say "Is that a fucking zombie?!  Oh my God, it is." And then you'd hurry quietly away, hoping that it's one of those slow zombies and not a fast one that can climb because we've all seen The Walking Dead and we know that screaming our fool heads off while running and waving our arms is probably the worst thing we could do in a situation like this.  No matter how overwhelming the urge.  And don't go to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta unless you have a deathwish, because that guy is really fucking depressed.

So here are the things I had expected, nay, planned to do during my newest (and last!) trip through college:

• Go to class and pay attention this time.
• Do my homework.
• Study.
• Be completely unassuming and keep my mouth shut, thereby not drawing unwanted attention to the decrepit old crone who is sharing space with you in this class, eighteen-year-old with the short-shorts with TEXAS printed on the ass.

And here are things I've already done that I never expected to do:

• Sleep in my car in-between classes like a hobo, because I have a lot of time on my hands, but not enough time to go home and come back and also I'm really, really tired.
• Spend a lot of time looking for places to plug my laptop in.
• Spend hours (and I mean hours) working on algebra.
• Embarrass myself in front of God and everybody in Business Computing class because I know a lot about Superman and can't keep my mouth shut.
• Embarrass myself in front of God and everybody in Business Computing class because I know a lot about the Titanic and can't keep my mouth shut.
• Be the person the Introduction to Radio and Television professor calls on to explain to the teenagers in the class such alien concepts as "Betamax" and "Laserdiscs."
• Pay particular attention to my clothes to make sure I don't look like I'm trying to dress like the rest of you people.  So that means that the Hello Kitty t-shirt my nine-year-old (hereafter: M1) picked out for me will never see the light of the CCC campus, because it's cute and funny to wear when I'm with her, and desperate and sort of sad-looking when I'm on a college campus with actual teenagers.
• Report back to my children twice a week in response to such questions as "What did you do in school today, Mom?" and "How many friends did you make today?"  Damn me for being an involved parent.  They mirror what you say to them, you know.

I have also developed an alarming physical tic in my US History class.  It's mainly to keep my eyes from rolling completely out of my head and falling at my feet.  The man at the front of the room tells magnificent and sweeping lies about the origins of our great nation and, sadly, grades my exams and papers and shit.  I don't want him to see my eyes fall out of my face and think of that while he's reading my essays.  There will be more (oh, so much more) about this particular professor in the future.  Actually, later today.  And there will be a liveblog of today's class so that you can judge for yourself.

I only go to class on Mondays and Wednesdays.  Mondays I have an Elementary Algebra class that starts at 7:30am, Introduction to Radio and Television and US History.  On Wednesdays, I have all that, plus a night class (Business Computing) that starts at about 5:45.   Clearly I waited until the very last second to register for classes.  Wednesdays, predictably, are killers.  I get the algebra homework knocked out pretty early and then you can generally find me either wandering aimlessly around campus looking for a place to plug in my laptop, reading a romance novel and drinking massive amounts of caffeine or sleeping in my car like a damn hobo, with my jacket rolled up like a pillow under my head.  I keep my doors locked, but I should probably park on a hill or something, in case there are zombies.  All part of expecting the unexpected.

How It Got To This Point

I did go to college right after high school.  I spent a year at a Baptist school (chapel every Friday, Bible classes as prerequisites) studying Music Education (read: singing every.single.day).  It wasn't for me.  To be very frank, I completely tanked at it.  It might have been because I've been singing ever since I could reliably stand with other kids in a straight line and I was completely burnt out from it.  It could be that a Baptist school was the worst possible environment for someone with as many subversive leanings as I have.  It could have been that I was eighteen and just didn't give a shit.

I went home every weekend to see my boyfriend (my husband now), and basically didn't engage.  I spent a lot of time on campus running a highly scientific experiment regarding the length of time you have to spend lying prone on a mattress before you actually become one with it.  I hated my roommates (by the end of the first semester, I'd had two) and eventually completed my hermitude by getting a private room.  (Hermitude is a word.  I know, because I just made it up.)  I shared a bathroom that second semester with friends who kept me from becoming a disgusting shadow of my former self, allergic to sunlight and snarling at passers-by.  One of them even got me an on-campus job teaching English as a Second Language, which turned out to be awesome.

I left school in May of 1997.  It is now February 2011.  That's almost fourteen years completely outside the world of academia, unless you count parent-teacher conferences at Montessori and elementary schools, and volunteering at bake sales.  I got a job when I left school.  I moved out, got married, had kids and a career.  And for the last two years, I've been working for myself.  But there's a huge difference between the money I make now and the money I could make if I had that accounting degree.

Thus, here we are.  Far from the year I spent drenched in Tracy Chapman, laying on my twin bed wondering what does it all meeeean?.  You get way more out of college when you're past thirty.  If it wasn't for the fact that we, as a nation, would have a hugely unskilled workforce between the ages of 18 and 30, I'd say everyone should do it.  You go to class religiously, because it's your money on the line, and money means something to you now.  You listen.  You take notes.  You actually study.  You realize that alcohol affects your ability to do all of the above, so you don't do it on school nights.  Maybe some people do that the first time around.  If they do, they are much more mature as a young person than I ever was.  (Disclaimer in case my mother is reading this: I did not drink at Baptist School.  It was a dry campus.  But if it hadn't been, there's no telling what I would have done.)

Clearly, there are drawbacks, too.  We downsized our housing situation to accommodate me doing this.  I'm working part-time and being a mom too, which conflicts far more often than you might think.  And I spend a lot of time being utterly exhausted.  But it's a trade-off I'll gladly make for having this experience and, by the end of it, the means to make our lives and our kids' lives a lot better.

So here's what you can expect from me here on this blog.  I promise to give you (mostly) unvarnished accounts of my time here at City College of the City (or CCC, as I'll probably refer to it, because I like anagrams).  I promise to liveblog my US History class once a week, which is hilarious all on its own, with no input from me.  Because I find the experience entirely entertaining (clearly I like alliteration as well), I promise to try to entertain you in return.  If you have pots of money and you think I'm funny and would like to buy the blog, I promise to sell out promptly and with lots of fanfare.  My kids will one day need to go to college.  But hopefully not before they're thirty.