I'm back in DC. Grad school applications are done. Now what? My high school guidance counselor called this the point when "the prayer service begins." But, since grad school is not college and I don't have to get in or die, the prayer service is less applicable (though, perhaps not uncoincidentally, there is a huge debate over whether there is a God raging on the grad school forums at this very moment). So I am spending my time formulating back-up plans, which essentially consists of figuring out the best and most efficient way to become a high school history teacher in or near Chicago without paying for a two-year MA in education. The (unnecessary) obstacles to this plan are actually quite impressive.
(Incidentally, when I interview high school seniors who are applying to the U of C, I ask them why they're going to college and what they'd do if they couldn't go to college for some reason. I think I ask this just to torment them, because I know very well that the real answer, at least for students applying to schools like Chicago, is that they're going to college because that is what they've been doing since they were born, and if they couldn't go to college, they're pretty sure they'd die. And that's fair enough, I guess. But of course, they all know better than to say that.)
Still, contingency planning is only a part-time activity. What to do with the rest of the winter? Start a Skokie-centric literature? Attempt to report something? Write an essay connecting Joan Didion's essays to Merle Haggard's music, a connection which exists primarily in the coincidental fact that I read one while listening to the other? Draw webcomics? Learn German?
Sunday, January 04, 2009
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5 comments:
asking students why they wanted to go to college was hands down my favorite question last year. and i totally did it to watch them squirm. if anyone asked me that when i was a high school senior, i probably would have crawled under the table and died.
Joan Didion's essay on John Wayne was clearly meant to be a country song. The entire essay collection of Slouching Toward Bethlehem would make a great LP, although I think a smoky, sassy contralto voice would do it better. Can't quite put my name on the singer I'm thinking of, but she's out there.
jennie: i'd kind of like to interview a kid who just told the truth, which is that he is a good student who wants to have a lucrative career, and he cares about prestige. i would be pleased by this answer.
withywindle: joni mitchell sings joan didion on the demise of the world in 1969?
one of my favorite answers last year was when a kid answered my question with, "i want to go to college because i want to be rich" and after a lengthy pause, he added "i mean, rich in my mind!"
it was as awkward as it sounds. and i did need to restrain myself from laughing.
When I think of what a fat-headed, clueless dork I was when applying for college, I can't imagine being able to interview myself without losing it. All of the idealistic nonsense that I believed about "The Academy", as if we were going to sit around in togas and think deep thoughts. Of course I never spoke about that, but I really wanted to go to college to become a professor and ... wear a tweed jacket and think deep thoughts.
It's funny, because now the things that annoy me about universities are largely in the areas where they FAIL to act like the big businesses that they are.
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