College classes on my campus start in two weeks. This has a lot of ramifications for someone like me who works in an academic department of a major public university, and the fact that it's now noticeably harder to find time to post on my blogs is probably among the lesser of them in terms of impact on the planet and its denizens. Up near the top of that list, though, sits one reality: New students. They haven't yet hit campus but they are hitting their keyboards and their phone lines, nearly every one of which, I can't help but observe, has a fuzzy or intermittent connection which makes me suspect that most of the new students are coming from some distant planet whose primary mineral component is lead or uranium.
And then there are the parents of the new students. Their phone calls are crystal clear. They have really good phones and they would rather forget to walk the dog than to neglect recharging their phone nightly. Their phone connections are so good their cultural background is usually unmistakeable, and here it is, like it or not: They are almost all from one of two cultural pools, and in these cultural pools, let me tell you, no one is there for the recreational swim; they are all churning up the waters in well-coached and impressive laps, aiming for the turn that will slice a hundredth of a second off their time to ensure The Final Victory.
Oh. Excuse me. I said, "their time." Excuse me. After listening to a series of these calls today, I have fallen victim to the false premise underlying every single one of them: That the Child is the same as the Parent. The race in question is really their son's, but you wouldn't know it from their phone calls. Here's one. Perhaps you know her.
"Hullo? Do I have the Right Person? I'm calling from New York. My son is coming to your school there in just a few weeks, I don't know why really, he was accepted at better schools, schools not halfway across the country, schools that could actually take him someplace in this god-forsaken world we live in, but anyway he's coming. Didn't even get any financial aid from you out there, though Rutgers and Case both offered him plenty, and they would have been closer, too. But no. His favorite uncle went out there, not that he really amounted to much, my husband's brother not mine, but my son worships him for god knows what reason, though he does have a good head of hair, unlike my husband, not that I mind. Well. My son is having difficulty enrolling in your courses. He took every single AP course his high school offered, and your computer doesn't recognize a single one of them apparently, and it keeps saying he doesn't have the prerequisites. Have you heard of AP coursework out there? We paid good money for these AP courses, you should know; public education is not as free as they'd like you to think, but you should know that; look at the tuition you are charging us to send our son out there to this 'public' university of yours."
This is my day, listening to this. Do you notice how the speaker is not the student who is having difficulty enrolling? No. The student is finishing a summer tennis tourney or on a backpacking trip on the Appalachian Trail or sleeping off his introduction to Sangria in some Mediterrnaean province whose nationality he's not even 100% certain is Spanish. He can play tennis and sleep like this because he knows: Mom Knows Best. He gave up trying to curb her enthusiasm for his life several years ago, when she stormed into his high school wearing an extra coating of lipstick just to wag her finger at the drama coach for choosing his best friend for the musical's male lead. At a certain point, the student knows, you just have to cut your losses. It's less humiliating this way, really, and a lot less frustrating if you don't even stay close enough to have to hear how she does this.
And this is why I stick it out with his mother. Because somewhere out there, there is, I'm quite sure, a remarkable young man I will really enjoy having in our university and our department. And away from this woman, whose life is severely deprived despite her imposing collection of handbags and the fact that she's already sailed on every major cruise line north of the equator. She should probably be directing relief efforts or dispensing micro loans in some African nation rather than obsessing about her child's inevitably outstanding education, but despite that thwarting of her talents, this young man is going to blossom. She's right about one thing: He's bright, and he's nice.
How do I know this? I went to school with this young man several decades ago, and he is now an outstanding middle-aged man, the kind of guy who makes you wonder now why you ever broke up with him then. He's written a few books, he's been mentioned twice in the New York Times, he was on a Sunday morning talk show once, though never on Oprah. So I listen to his mother today and when she is all done and I hear her finally ask, "Are you there? Hullo? Are you with me here?" I answer calmly, "Yes, I'm here and I will be absolutely happy to help your son; please have him call me at his first opportunity. We look forward to having him here with us," and carefully place the phone back in its charger.
School days, school days. Dear old Golden Rule Daze.
Next post: The super-achieving Indian student, or why does India not rule the world?
No comments:
Post a Comment