My Alma Mater Loves Money
The rotary phone of my youth!
Mamacita says: At least once a week, I get a phone call from my alma mater’s alumni association asking for money. I got another one tonight. Don’t calls like this fall into the “Do Not Call” category? Apparently not.
Hark, they need money. I’m so surprised.
Hi, my name is Muffy McFreshman, and I’m calling from YOUR ALUMNI ASSOCIATION! How are you this evening? I wonder if this rain will ever stop, don’t you? Golly, the golf course was nearly deserted this afternoon, and nobody at all was in the club pool. Now, we know you’ve been out there for a while, making a lot of money, thanks to the degree this university gave you all those years ago, and don’t you think it’s time to give some of it back? I’d love to take your contribution tonight! Don’t you think $1,000 would be a nice beginning? You can always raise that amount, if you like! That’s a lovely beginning though, don’t you think?
I do, Muffy. I honestly do. When may I expect your check? My mortgage is due in a few days.
What’s that? You were asking ME to send YOU that amount? I’m sorry, but I couldn’t raise that amount if you gave me a year in which to try.
My parents sent four kids to this university, and among of we have several graduate degrees and a doctorate. I sent my daughter to this university, and she put herself through graduate school. Now she’s putting herself through a post-doctorate program. My son would like to attend your university, but we can’t afford it and neither can he, so he’s biding his time getting a series of degrees from a community college until he can afford to transfer the credits and go to your college.
I think your university has enough of this family’s money.
Also, your Alumni Magazine is boring. I read it when it comes because I read everything that crosses my path, but really, you’re hurting your cause by printing all those articles about rich alumni, golf, cruises, and foreign exchange students who fall in love with America and intend to stay here forever because they’ve found such high-paying careers here. All that is nice, but it doesn’t have anything to do with me. I can’t relate to people who have enough money to cover their billls, let alone live in luxury.
Now, if you had articles about how to pay your bills when even a graduate degree isn’t bringing in enough money to cover the mortgage, that would be helpful.
It might also be easier to believe the Alumni Association needs money if I hadn’t seen that huge, gorgeous building they’ve built for themselves. That thing is enormous, and it really is beautiful. Those windows! All that lovely stone! The carvings! You should be really proud of that building.
P.S. You can buy your own darn carpet and wall art for the inside.
Remember the Modular System? It Was Awesome.
Sad but true. VERY sad, and very true. And absolutely outrageous.
Mamacita says: Ah, the modular system. It’s gone forever, of course, but how sad. The modular system was absolutely perfect for the above average student. Too bad the above average student has no rights these days.
(There are schools who have systems they refer to as “mod systems,” but they aren’t true modular systems; they’re just systems that group kids together all day. You know, like elementary systems do.) (Fie on those.)
School has started, and the memories of my first teaching gig are running wild in my head. That experience was fabulous. I loved it. That kind of educational environment doesn’t exist any more in the public schools, and I consider that a tragedy.
My very first teaching job was in a brand-new high school that was set up in a non-traditional way: some of you may remember the “mod” system? No? I feel old.
Twenty-two 20-minute periods, or “mods” a day. A week was 6 days, and most classes met every other day. A regular class was usually two mods; a study period might be any length, from one to four mods; labs were four or five mods, etc. Academic classes were divided into large group/small group, just like college. For example, a student might have English on Days 2, 4, and 6 during mods 9 and 10. Day 1 wasn’t necessarily Monday; it was simply the day after Day 6. Attendance was taken first mod and wasn’t taken again the whole rest of the day. Students had a huge commons area for ‘free time.’ There was a SMOKING AREA on the side of the building, and teachers had duty there! The sense of openness and freedom and personal responsibility was tremendous.
Except for the smoking area, I loved it.
All the kids loved it, except the ones who couldn’t adapt to the freedom. Kids who desperately needed, REQUIRED, a rigid routine, just couldn’t cut it. But for the above-average kid, it was heaven.
Sure, some of the super bright kids took advantage of it, too, but the super bright kids COULD, and still achieve fabulous success at school. I’m talking to you, Diana.
Unfortunately, above-average kids weren’t the majority.
The experiment was ruined by those kids who just cut classes every day and hung out in the smoking area or the commons, or who left the open campus at noon and never came back, day after day, or who wandered aimlessly, lost and confused, trying to figure out where they were supposed to go on Day four, Mod seven. Even though they had a schedule in their hand.
Many parents never quite understood the concept either, and objected. Mostly the parents of the kids who never quite understood the concept.
At the time, I really did think I’d died and gone to school-heaven. I envied the students. For someone like me, that kind of ‘schedule’ would have been perfection. For many kids, it WAS perfection. For the first time, a school was actually catering to the bright trustworthy kids.
It didn’t last long, of course.
It lasted two years, and then the school board decided to go back to ‘traditional’ scheduling. Unfortunately, the new building had not been designed for anything traditional; it was too open.
So they cut up all that lovely open space into little cubicle classrooms with no windows and turned into a traditional six-period high school. The smoking area stayed for a few more years and then common sense kicked in, the only time common sense was ever utilized in the history of this building.
The building was planned and built for grades 10-12. A few weeks before it was finished, the board decided to send the freshmen there, too. And then they wondered why it was too small from day one.
It’s a shame. Even though it was too late for me as a student, for the first time in my life I had been exposed to a concept that catered to the smart kids, the reliable kids, the GOOD kids, the funky kids, the quirky kids, the kids who could be trusted with a little time.
But, as usual, because of the other kind of kids (and their parents) we lost it.
I am thinking as I write this of two famous writers and their philosophies. One is Plutarch, and the other is Mark Twain.
It was Plutarch who said, “Being about to pitch his camp in a likely place, and hearing there was no hay to be had for the cattle, ‘What a life,’ said he, ‘is ours, since we must live according to the convenience of asses!’ ”
Plutarch’s ass.
And it was Mark Twain who said, “”In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.”
School boards, Congress. . . they’re all political and neither listens to the people they’re supposed to represent. Unless, of course, someone has big money.
Mark Twain could always be counted on to speak the truth.
Of course, Twain also said “I have never let schooling interfere with my education.”
Amen.
And please don’t think I am heartless, although I’m sure many of you do. I firmly and thoroughly believe in a good sound remedial program; that’s what I teach now.
I just don’t believe that the remedial and special programs should dictate or slow down the programs for the entire student body.
Freshman Innocence, Then and Now
Mamacita says: You lookin’ for innocence? A long time ago, in a universe far, far away, there lived a teenage girl so naive it was honestly dangerous.
She had been nowhere. She had done nothing. The good-night kiss, lips together, on the front porch, light on, father listening to every word and rustle because his bedroom window was also the porch window, was as far as she’d ever “gone.”
Most of her clothing was ordered from the Sears catalogue.
Most of her shoes were purchased at Jeff’s Shoe Store, a local shop that carried brand name shoes, if by “brand name” what you mean is “Keds.”
Not that that mattered to this girl’s mother, who bought saddle oxfords in winter and made the girl wait until May to get what she still refers to as “tennis shoes.” Which the girl had to use SHOE POLISH on to keep them snow white, although she occasionally cheated with baby powder. The point is, they had to be kept snow white.
One of the things this teen looked forward to most, about going away to college, was wearing whatever she wanted from the top of her head to the soles of her feet.
The problem was, she had no money to buy anything different from what her mother had packed for her to take up to the dorm.
So the girl had to improvise. And by “improvise,” I mean the girl went out in public looking like a something that crawled out from under a boxcar, mated with a cartoon gypsy who had been exiled from the tribe for having no taste, tripped and fallen into the place where the art students threw out their dirty paint water, and misinterpreted the mirror as saying “You look so groovy, girl!”
The girl did do one thing right away, though. She walked down to Target (which was then called Ayre-Way) and bought a pair of jeans.) That’s right – the girl didn’t even own a pair of jeans. And now she did.
And so began the freshman year. It began a day later than it should have, because the girl couldn’t leave her hometown boyfriend who was leaving for Purdue the next day. They went on a sentimental picnic, where the girl pressed lips, still together, in a place other than the brightly lit front porch, built a campfire the size and shape of a caterpillar tractor, sat around it until it turned to sparks and sad, sad ashes, and was taken home for another kiss, this time on the usual place, on the usual places, with the usual bright lights and fatherly commentary.
And so it begins this week for other people’s teenage daughters and sons. Hopefully, this year’s crop won’t be as stupid and naive and stupid and naive as I was, but then, even back then, nobody else was as stupid and naive as I was.
It’s a good thing all my boyfriends were decent guys, that’s all I’m sayin’. Because I knew nothing. NOTHING. I once went to a porn movie at a drive-in with FOUR GUYS. They treated me like the gentlemen they were.
There is such a thing as being dangerously innocent. When a girl is eighteen, she really needs to know a few things. These days, teenage girls know maybe too much, even. But I could probably guarantee that none of them would go to a porn movie at a drive-in with four guys. Not all guys are gentlemen.
It would have been so easy to. . .
But they didn’t, so everything was all right.
I was lucky, though. Your daughter might not be so lucky. Teach her a few things before you send her away to college.
Then again, these days, our daughters probably know more than we do now and could teach US a few things.
Not mine, though. She was an innocent, too.
I swear.
