People are complaining about how “woke” university students are again these days, because it turns out young people can actually care about things. Go figure! It’s a stereotype that has been around probably since there have been young people going to school and old people who think they know better than those “smart” kid, though of course the term “woke” wasn’t then what it is today. And it was certainly a stereotype that existed in 2012/2013 when I went back to school as an adult. Which is why one of my classes once disappointed me pretty badly.

I had assumed I had written about this before on the site, but I can’t find it. I’ve definitely written about it somewhere on the Internet, but for completeness sake I need it here too.

I think it was one of my first-year classes, one that focused on Popular Culture in general. It seemed like it’d be up my alley. There were probably a hundred or so students in the class, so sometimes it would be broken up into groups of three with my group being taught by a TA (and, I assume the other groups also being taught by TAs, maybe one by the actual professor, who knows, doesn’t matter). So my sub-group of the class was probably thirty-something large.

At some point the TA of my group did a poll of the class asking if we thought there was still a need for Feminism. I was the only one who raised a hand to say there was. Maybe that’s my memory playing tricks on me, it’s been more than a decade now after all. Maybe there was one or two others. But you know what there wasn’t? More than that. Where were all those stereotypical “woke” students I’d want to be learning alongside?

I was disappointed, but I rationalized it. It was a first-year class, these were the youngest kids, yet to learn much of the real world outside their high schools. And I also assumed that there were probably some who thought feminism is good, but were afraid to raise their hands in a class that clearly didn’t agree with them. Maybe if more of them had, hands would have gone up in great number. I’ll never know.

I wanted my fellow students to be the kind of care about feminism and anti-racism and bringing down the man and all that. But that batch wasn’t. Because I’m not that big on the dumb systems we all live under and I would love to believe that there’s a generation out there with energy who might be able to help change things.

Shame how the kids who actually are like that get treated.

At this point the city is teeming with students again, and classes have begun anew. I am not attending them, though. Intent on becoming financially stable, I am taking at least a year off of my schooling. This is the monetary saving that I should have before I quit my job to go back to school, but that I had not the forethought for.

I am a little sad that I won’t be in school (though if I can find some that fit into my schedule, I may sit in on some larger, easy-to-blend-into classes), but I was also getting pretty tired of all the stuff I hate about school too. Perhaps this break will allow me to refocus on the positives sides of schooling before I go fully hateful of the system, as I did back in my teenage years.

And also, maybe I’ll have more money when the year is over.

But I will to work on my education in my own way through this year. I have taken fifty books from my Unread Books bookshelf and set them aside in a pile. I plan on reading the heck out of all that pile before this time next year. Some are the kind of works of literature that could come up in my education. Others are not. Either way, it’s more reading than I’ve been able to do during a school year, which is generally close to none. Here goes.

Oh hey, I just remembered that I get marks for those classes I did. There weren’t many this year, but here they is:

Outlaw Tales: A-
The Vampire: B+
The Short Story: B+

There were also two classes I took that I dropped out of a few months in because I was feeling burned out. For these I’ve been given a “W” for “withdrawal” I assume, but the joke is on them because I still learned a bunch of stuff and didn’t even have to write any exams.

Popular Cinema: W
The Pirate and Piracy: W

The bigger news, though, is that I am probably taking at least a year off school. As mentioned, I have scaled down from a full-time student to a part-time student because balancing work and school has worn me out. But the consequence I had not foreseen about this plan was that I now have to start paying off my student loans already. In order to afford that, I need to work more. To be honest, I could probably use the break from school. This winter really got me down on it.

My 2014 Report Card
My 2013 Report Card

It’s been a while, let’s see what PDR is up to:

Okay, yesterday I wrote my last exam of the semester, so I haven’t got class again until the new year. This is nice, because I’ve been feeling kinda mentally exhausted lately. Last year I was doing seven days a week without a day off from both work or school, but I just can’t bring myself to do that again. I assume that this is all proof that I’m too old, but I don’t want to do that again. I’m only going to be a part-time student from this point onward.

I’ve also been off work for a little while for a reason I will likely expand upon in a later post. I’ll go back this weekend, but the time with less school and work has allowed me to be more productive at other things. Kip and I are still working on a project, which I mentioned last time, but which I am still being vague about.

In more noticeable news, I have started a new feature of the site: I am reviewing fictional beekeepers. I’ve done two so far and I hope to do about four or five more before classes start back up. Once busytimes begin anew, I’ll drop down to about one beekeeper review a month, essentially filling the gap I left when I stopped doing Canadian Heritage Moment reviews. (On that note, there are still a handful of those left that I haven’t reviewed. I’ll try to do them if inspiration ever strikes.)

Haiku!

Trouble from the moon.
Reverse astronauts are here
and they want our cash.

That’s it for now. I’ll be back at some point before January, though, because experience tells me that once school starts I’ll be silent for months.

I mentioned the class I dropped during the first week of this year’s schoolin’s, but I haven’t said anything about my other classes. Let’s do something about that. I’m taking a class that is about the history of Vampires.

I wouldn’t say I’m a big reader of vampire fiction. I’ve read Dracula, and I’ve read Salem’s Lot, and I’ve read the Tomb of Dracula comics, but that is probably about it. Still, it seems like an interesting enough topic. So here I am.

So far, I very much enjoy the class. The professor actually lectures! That may not seem like an exceptional thing, but far too many professors I have encountered try to have a dialogue with the class. They stop every five minutes to ask a question, or even just get them to finish a sentence. I get that they’re trying to draw things out of the students so that they have to actually think or whatever, but it always slows everything down. We get significantly more class when they don’t stop class every five minutes. I pay attention to the lectures, so the interminable nuisance. It’s nice to have something better for a change.

Still, though. There’s a lot of reading in this, and all of my classes. I made a real effort to keep up with all the readings this year, and with only three classes I thought I could do it, but I failed. I am already behind. To be truthful, it’s kinda disheartening. There’s plenty of ways, good and bad, that school makes me feel stupid, but none gets to me more than the repeated insistence that the more I read the quicker I should be able to read. I read a lot, but I am and always have been very slow at it. I shouldn’t take it so hard, after all, I skipped whole books I was supposed to read last year without hurting my grades, but it’s sad to me because I really did try and I really did fail.

Anyway, in the meantime, I’ve been failing to keep on top of Secret Government Robots again. This time, it is for a better reason: Kip and I are working on a pretty neat project (details will come in the future). I’m pretty excited about that, so pretty much any time I’ve had that was not already claimed by school, or work, or sleep, I’ve been spending on that. If I’ve now given up on trying to keep up on school readings, maybe I’ll have time to do that instead.