An Unlonely Number

Our greatest accomplishments require time alone.  If the young Einstein had been chatting with his buddies on that city trolley around a century ago, we still might not have the theory of relativity, and E=MC(squared) might be just another meaningless bit of formula that never attached itself to a concept. The Williams sisters have spent a lot of quality time with the ball machine, perfecting those killer shots. St. Augustine, Thoreau, Marx, and even the party boy of the 20th century, F. Scott Fitzgerald, used solitude to think, to dream, and to write ideas that shook the world.

If you're considering going back to school at whatever level, and you fear being cut off from your social life, bear in mind that in order to become the person you really are, you need to spend time with yourself.  That old cliche' about loving yourself is fine, but what real accomplishment requires is that you really know yourself so you can open your heart and your life. Then your true self can been seen in the world around you through your work, not just your voice.

So many people worry about being alone.  They fill their days and nights with movement and casual friends, labor and workmates, hobbies and trips to the gym, the beach, the hardware store, Acapulco, the sushi bar . . . And when they finally get home, they fill the air around them with their music, and the surround sound from the TV and the phone calls to more and more people as they try to fill every hour in the days to come.

Alternatively, why not turn off all the noise? Stop answering the cell phone for two days. No email for a whole weekend. Turn off the stereo and the iPod. Cancel a few social events and put the gardening and hot yoga aside for a while, and just see what you really think. Listen to yourself when you are thinking about something more important than your credit card balance, and get familiar with that voice.

That's the voice you'll hear a lot once you're back in class, because you'll be spending more time alone than you do now, studying, thinking, planning, and executing. Eventually in the educational process, each student discovers that solitude is both a treasure and a key that unlocks even more delights than those noisy people can ever imagine.

Relentless, But in a Good Way

Just recently, I bought a gizmo. This is the third or fourth gizmo I've bought from the same company, but it's been a few years since I purchased the last one. I like the new gizmo even more than I liked the old gizmo: it does what it is supposed to do, it's dependable, and it's cute. As for the company that makes the gizmo, I have no real opinion. Same for the company that sold it to me. Nonetheless, the two companies, thanks to this simple financial transaction, are now driving me nuts trying to be my new best friend.

Since I handed them the money to pay for the gizmo, I have had three phone calls, four emails, three snailmails, and three quizzes from these folks. The gizmo and I have taken to hiding in the house with the blinds drawn because I've started imagining the gizmo's parent company sending out a crack paramilitary troupe just to make sure everything is okay with my customer satisfaction, since I waited 24 hours to respond to their last survey request.

On reflection, I know that this is just the current mode of post-sales marketing. Someone somewhere at the gizmo's factory wants to find out why I bought the gizmo. So does someone at the place where I bought it. Luckily, I know why I bought the gizmo: I want to use it.

All this persistence is good, though, because it reminds me of the most essential tool in seeking out an education at whatever academic level. Relentless persistence will keep the non-trad student going back to class for every meeting, writing copious notes, and then following the professor to his/her office to learn even more during the posted office hours. While traditional young students will worry that they shouldn't be bothering the professor, or that their questions are too dumb, or that the professor doesn't like answering questions, the non-trad has been around long enough to know that the office hours are part of the academic package that comes in exchange for that insanely large tuition-and-fees check. That persistence that you learned on the job, that got the daily, weekly, and quarterly projects and reports done, is what will mark you out as a student who gives a damn, and gets the As.

Now, if only I could convince the gizmo's parent company that they have been sufficiently persistent. Maybe I should send them an A, and a shiny gold star as a bonus.

Real Help

This blog gets a little repetitive for some people. I spend a lot of time being awfully rah-rah-rah, in my efforts to support non-traditional students who are considering going back to school. The fact is, though, that I needed (and sometimes still need) a lot of support, and I don't want anyone to miss out on learning just because no one is standing right there at the registrar's office yelling, "Sign up! Do it now!"

I realize, though, that some non-trads will never consider going back to school because they think they may have a learning disability, vision problems, attention deficits, or really bad writing habits. That's a shame, because the modern university, as well as most community colleges, offers support for people who have a steeper hill to climb than many of us.

At St. Martin's University, we have the Learning and Writing Center; the equivalent facility is right in the center of things on the University of Washington campus. Besides the usual tutoring in math, philosophy, the sciences, and Japanese, French, German, and English, these centers also offer supportive services for all kinds of learning problems. They also offer peer readers, to help students turn out writing assignments, but for now, let's talk about the support.

Suppose you have dyslexia, and it's pretty severe. Depending on your needs and preferences, at a learning center you can complete testing to make sure that's the issue, rather than an eye problem; get help with taking class notes; learn how to work with your professors to arrange for more time to take tests or turn in papers; train to use software that translates your spoken words into computerized text; learn how to adapt Word and other software to your needs; and work with tutors and peer readers to manage your workload.

From working with a few students last semester, I know that learning disabilities do not mean that a person is stupid -- far from it. A particular student mathematician comes to mind: he's a brilliant logician and understands the whole of the mathematics syllabus without a single problem. However, he cannot spell or write down a coherent sentence on his own. The challenges of academic English leave him anxious and frustrated. I can't say that working with the student peer readers and tutors in the Learning Center has solved all his problems, but the Center has helped, and he'll be back in school this fall, instead of quitting his studies way short of his potential to do good things for the world.

In talking about non-trads with the staff at the Learning Center, I found out that many older students just don't use the services very much, even though the cost of them is included in the tuition. If using a tool from the Learning Center, whether it's time management or a sophisticated software system, is the difference between an A and dropping out again, isn't it wiser to reach out for that tool?

While you're on campus, looking over the layout of the buildings or signing up for this fall's classes, stop by your school's Learning Center. It could unlock a lot of mysteries for you when school starts.

Never Too Late, No Matter Who Says What

I overheard someone say it again this past weekend: "I'm just too old to do that. It's way too late for me to try." Unless the man was talking about sky-diving or dating Paris Hilton, I can't agree. No matter what age we are, there is always time and energy to do important and meaningful work in this world. It's simply up to each of us to find it.

The really amazing thing I hear a lot from younger adults, in their 20s and 30s, is that they just don't think they can manage going back to school, even for an associate degree. From what I've seen over the past couple of years at St. Martin's University, the house, the job, the spouse, the sports team, even the kids, are all excuses that can be turned into assets with a little thought and planning.

Not everything will work out perfectly. Elsewhere in this blog i discuss some techniques for managing childcare logistics. Even with the best planning, though, everyone has childcare glitches that make stray days here and there really challenging. On the other hand, your child may get to meet your classmates. I particularly cherished getting to meet a little guy named Sawyer, who charmed an entire Women's Lit class with his patience and sunny smile.

Admissions deadlines are negotiable: check online, and then walk into the registrar's office and ask for help.

As for finances, have you asked? Check out scholarships, grants, and loans offered by your school, and go in and talk to the financial aid officer. You do not have to take out a bunch of loans to get through school; if you do the work and show you can excel at your studies, you can get grants and scholarships that will ease the way. Alternatively, you can continue to work and pay for each class as you go, taking one or two courses per session.

Or, you can get all the way to your 80th birthday, and wonder what you did with your spare time all the way back in the day as you get dressed for your shift as a greeter at Space-Mart because you were always too busy to get that degree.

Why Johnny Won't Read

I love the smell of a new textbook, the sort of bleachy, chemical headiness that comes only from the freshest of soy ink and the slickest of paper. I love the charts, the maps, the illustrations, the fonts, and the chapter headings. Then there's the promise that floats over every book, that by the time you finish reading through its pages, you will know something that is shared only by the people who have thought deeply about the subject of the book, whatever it is.

This love is almost undiscriminating. I adore history books, particularly those about the history of small things, like clothing or cookware or farming tools. I lust after cookbooks, much to the chagrin of one of my professors, and I long for books about Paris and architecture. I want every book on Greek philosophy ever written, and I have a panting desire for biographies of obscure poets and famous clothing designers. A used book store can make me almost faint from all the siren calls from the mystery and literature sections. Mathematics, on the other hand, are not my thing.

In other words, my T-shirt should read: "English Major: You do the math." I have no warmth for numbers and sometimes ask store clerks to count out the coins I hand them because I just never got the hang of counting change. But even I could tell when a social sciences professor tried to put one over on his class. Names are being withheld to protect the not-so-innocent PhD who had the nerve sometime in the past two years to tell our class that he would be assigning "under 100 pages every week, so you shouldn't have any trouble getting the reading done." This was right after he had distributed a syllabus that made it clear that the reading for the first week totalled over 130 pages. We could see in black-and-white that he seemed to think that if 70 pages were due on Monday, and another 75 were due on Friday, that somehow came to 100 a week.

Even to an English major, this seemed a little outlandish.

So, if you take my advice and enroll in even one class, consider your reading workload and make room for it in your life. Consider renting your textbooks and invest heavily in Post-its, so you can make extensive notes.

A lot of traditional students do the math, totalling up all their class reading assignments, and then hyperventilate for a while before they go off to buy some pizza and a few beers. Most of the assigned reading on a college campus these days doesn't get done because of professors like the one I mentioned a few paragraphs ago. Be prepared, do the page counts, and use the professor's office hours to help him check his math. And then discuss the reading with him, so he knows you're doing it. No matter what his research grants say, that's what he's there for, and that's what your tuition is paying for.

Looks like it's time for me to go read a novel.

Prepare for Surprises

Way last fall, I was deeply involved in writing a paper for a philosophy conference. Just so you know, here's what I learned from the experience:

Some graduate students and professors, while delighted to be invited, and excited to include their academic papers in their CVs, don't actually prepare for these events at all.

In a word, my colleagues from SMU and I were the oddballs at the conference. We wore business attire, we had PowerPoint displays, we had rehearsed, we had edited our papers and prepared thumb drive copies for anyone who wanted to read the final drafts , we were on time, we checked the equipment before we started, we hadn't slept the night before . . . We were total philosophy nerds with a side order of Microsofty.

Our peers stood at the podiums and shuffled through preliminary drafts of their papers, reading occasional paragraphs, sifted through a few more pages, read something else that sounded a little random, and said things like, "Oh, I forgot to read you this part back here."

Academic conferences may differ by discipline. English conferences, say those sponsored by the Modern Language Association, may be a lot different, and I'm certain engineering conferences are so buttoned down that they squeak, organizationally speaking. There is a middle path, though, and the next time I do another academic conference, I will do a lot of the same preparation that I did for this one. However, I'll also do some things I didn't do before this one:

• Check out the sponsoring organization's culture by looking at photos of previous conferences. If I'd known that professors were presenting in Pendleton shirts, I might have left the suit and heels at home.


• Be fully prepared with all the electronic presentation tools, but be ready to work without them. Not every academic conference is the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, and not every presentation is in a big auditorium, so you need to be ready to scale it back for more intimate settings.


• Carry a business card with your email address on it, and maybe the URL for your blog. Yes, there's an app for that, but not everyone carries that kind of phone.


• Check out local restaurants in advance online: Indian, Chinese, and Thai food trump the usual college cafeteria or banquet fare most of the time, and you can have better conversations in small groups than you can at a huge table if you meet any interesting conferees.

So, if you go back to school and you get invited to present at a conference, square your shoulders and your paper, and keep your eyes open -- it's another learning opportunity.

It's been a little crazy . . .

Since last November, when I evidently last posted to this blog, a zillion things have happened, as they have in your life. The conference in Oregon was a lot different from what I had prepared for, and the work load in school got even more intense, and then stayed that way all the way through the final semester at St. Martin's University.

I didn't help matters by taking on a part-time job as the morning news voice at a local radio station. This did neither my academic achievement or the station much good, I suspect. I just had too much going on, what with peer reading at the university's Learning Center, joining an English and an academic honorary, trying desperately to write a coherent senior thesis (which is still a work in progress), maintaining the usual load of reading, writing, presentations, group projects, and the friendships of a lifetime . . .

It all simply became too much, despite daily meditation and all the other coping skills I could remember to use on occasion.

Nonetheless, I graduated, and I learned some stuff. Over the next few days, as I tidy up the last pages of the thesis and prepare to defend it, I'll try to tell you about some of the insights that came along and thwacked me over the head, and how this particular non-traditional student coped.
I'll give you a hint: a magic potion called pho is required for deeply successful academic magic to occur.