Study hall

So I’ve gone back to school. Things are going to be a little hectic around here, I mused tonight, stirring the pasta sauce with my left hand, a Freud textbook in my right. I stop to underline a particularly interesting passage and pause to look around the kitchen. I sigh. There’s a little collection of paper towel on the floor, a weak attempt to mop up a river of water that has run off the counter following an incident involving our lunatic cat and a vase of sunflowers. My gaze continues down the hall, where it lands grimly on the vacuum cleaner, which has taken up what appears to be a permanent post somewhere between the front hall and the living room. Another sigh. 

Classes started last Saturday, and as I took a chair in the front row (on the far left of the speaker), I laughed to myself. I am a mature student.  This was the descriptor given (by whom?) to the middle aged men and women who eagerly joined our university lectures, presumably to obtain a long sought-after degree. The hailed from all walks of life: empty nesters, stay-at-home moms with school aged children, bored accountants searching for inspiration from Blake. I have such a clear image of these ‘adults’, so keen were they, outspoken, so full of questions, having read the required material thoroughly, critically, and fairly bursting with intellectual curiosity. None of the apathy and indifference of the spotty, bleary-eyed twenty-somethings who slouched in the chairs beside them, winking and passing notes. They were keeners, the mature students, the kinds who always had an extra pen and highlighter carefully arranged on their desks. Ugh. How I judged them—when I cared to think about it—and how ironic that now, some twenty-plus years later, I am one of them.

Studies have shown that many if not most of us will have more than one career in our lifetimes. The notion of corporate loyalty is a thing of the past, technology has put an ever-changing face on opportunities, skills sets are constantly evolving and 40 is the new 30 and all that. What interested me at twenty falls a little short at 40+. It sounds so cliched and so, well, typical. But there it is. I am reduced to a statistic.

So off I go to the virtual bookstore, searching for the best textbook deals. I stock up on lined paper, pens and binders. I get a bookbag that is fashionably practical. I take my front-row seat in class. I read the assigned material; I ask good questions. I underline significant passages and even do a little extra research on-line at night. I balance the reading and the studying with family life and I have a messy kitchen and dusty floors.

And if you need one, I just happen to have an extra pen in my bag.

Comments

[David S. ( @seemsartless )]

Ha, how come EYE never see the vacuum cleaner there? Must be some sort of male blind-spot.

I also recall 'mature students' at university, especially in night classes - I never understood why they'd rather take a philosophy course then be home with their family?!

At the time I found them interesting, sort of like they were a different sub-species than us, and we could watch them here for 50 minutes in OUR environment and try to figure out what we might be like in 20 years. Now I realize they were most certainly thinking the same thing about US.