Top of the class to ‘ya

Subject: Special Recognition

 Dear Educating Rita,  
 Congratulations!  Because of your academic achievement at Rutgers
 University, you have been named as a recipient of the Rutgers 2008
 Academic Excellence Award.  This award is given by the University to the
 top 10% of sophomores at Rutgers based upon GPA performance in your
 respective Schools.
 
 You are cordially invited to attend a recognition ceremony, where you
 will be presented with this distinguished award on Sunday, March 30,
 2008 at 2:00 p.m. in the College Avenue Gym.  (Please arrive by 1:45
 p.m.)  A reception with light refreshments will immediately follow the
 ceremony, in the adjoining Gym Annex.  This event celebrates academic
 excellence, provides you the opportunity to mingle with your peers and
 honors your achievement in the presence of your family.  We ask that you
 dress professionally for this prestigious event.
 
 We have also sent a letter to your family inviting them to the ceremony,
 so be sure to RSVP on their behalf.  Please email us by Friday, March 14, 2008, noting whether you will attend and the number of guests you will bring.   You and your guests can park behind the
 Rutgers Student Center/College Avenue Gym or in the College Avenue
 Parking Deck for this event; you will not need a special parking pass.
 
 Once again, congratulations, on your academic achievement.   We look
 forward to recognizing your success!
 
 Sincerely,
Vice President for Undergraduate Education

Paging Dr. Douche……

There’s a young boy in my Dev of U.S. II class on Saturdays who was also in my Dev of the U.S. I class last semester. He’s white, but has adopted a very urban look and attitude. He wears a large diamond or CZ stud in his ears, often dons throwback jerseys, large gold chains around his neck, puffy jackets, and of course his hat is perched precariously on his head sideways. If you’re not familiar with this look, check out these fellas…

On the first day of class last semester, the professor asked us to say a few words about ourselves: where we were from, what our major was and why we were taking this class. This boy stood up and said three words. The name of his hometown followed by PRE MED. I almost fell out of my chair from the sheer ridiculousness of it.

Since then he hasn’t ever answered a question in class or offered any opinion on class discussions.

Today he sat next to me. I had the opportunity to see his laptop screen during the lecture, he carried on an AOL im conversation for the entire 3 hour class.

Good luck in med school yo!

Talking about my vag

On a whim I decided to audition for the V Day production of The Vagina Monologues at Douglass in late March.  It’s been a a while since I’ve been to an audition or been on a stage and I wanted to go mainly just to see if I could get it.

When I showed up, there were a bunch of young ladies discussing frat parties in the hall outside the audition room. Needless to say, I had little to bring to the table. They were discussing an upcoming heaven and hell part which immediately captured my attention so I asked “Where’s this?” and the answer was gamma something or other, a co-ed fraternity. Which, incidentally, doesn’t make sense how can a frat be c0-ed? Doesn’t the frat negate that? Maybe it’s called a social organization or some other PC term.

One girl asked me if I was a student. I’m assuming she meant Rutgers right? Inside my head I was singing “one of these things is not like the other things.”

I choose my monologue from the four choices and pretend to prepare while I eavesdrop on girls speaking about the plays subject matter in a very refreshing way. Well, maybe refreshing isnt the right word……wondrous, that’s it, they were filled with wonder discussing their orgasms and trying way too hard trying to sound casual as they said “cunt” over and over.

Today I learned I got a callback. We all sat together and did our monologues in front of each other.

As I did my second monologue, I decided to take a chance, and I couldn’t be happier with the reaction I got. The room was filled with  Heaty belly laughs and that sound literally fills me with a physical feeling of warmth and power and sheer bliss. There is no greater feeling in the world to me that making a room of people howl with laughter. I’ll find out tomorrow if I got it.

I thought it was just me…….

At the Sophia Club Holiday party a few of the other Bunting program ladies  mentioned how they were shunned by the younger students. They didn’t say it with sadness or avarice, it was more like…..amusement.

Seriously, I thought it was just me. I asked Jean about it and she elaborated, “the kids don’t like us because we ruin the curve.”

I don’t have a firm grasp on the whole “curve” thing but from what I can tell it grades the shitty students harsher if there are some really outstanding students.

Sitting around the table with the rest of the old biddies we laughed and joked about how younger students avoid sitting next to us, don’t chit chat (we used that word because we’re old biddies)  they only sit next to us on test day or talk to us if they’ve skived off class several days in a row and need to copy someone’s notes.

This took a load of  my mind as I thought maybe it was simply my misanthropic personality and not in fact judgmental teenagers.

Then the weirdest thing happened. In my Intro to American Studies class, which has around 150 students in it, someone talked to me.  Not just a question, but they…..I think it’s called…”struck up a conversation”. It happens so infrequently to me I’d almost forgot what it was.  I guess I’m just so used to doing things by myself and for myself that I don’t feel the need for chatting up strangers and when they do it to me, it’s something i don’t recognize.

Anyway, the woman who sits next to me in Intro, talks to me a lot. She’s older than me. But our conversations have overflowed into rows behind us and as serendipity would have it, the girl who sits behind me has exchanged messages with me on the class website.

She’s married and lives off campus so it’s not as if I’ve cracked the younger demographic or anything but it’s a start.

Enjoy your life…dummy

Last week in class (Culture of the 1950’s) we watched a documentary on the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. As one of the documentary participants was describing the deaths of the Rosenbergs in graphic detail, my classmate, Giselle, took out her iBook, opened Safari and went directly to perezhilton.com

Let that sink in.

Yeah.

The thing I hate about the kids I got to school with is their detachment and apathy. It’s not just this class. It’s the majority of the kids that sit alongside me. I know. I get it. I sound like an old curmudgeon who’s about to start waxing about how I had to walk to a one room schoolhouse in the snow…8 miles away…..with bare feet.

At their age I was also an asshole. I’m positive of it. But this new breed of asshole, romantically named “the millenials” are particularly offensive. There’s a new niche market of business consultants getting paid to inform companies how to deal with these little snotfaces. One particularly astute assessment has been made by Richard Laermer.

To really hammer the point home…a few kids were talkingto a visiting Accounting major from TCNJ and she asked them what they planned to do with a History degree. One girl answered, “whatever they pay me to”. Nice. I guess I just don’t understand what happened and it’s not just kids I go to class with at Rutgers, it’s people I work with, people in my family, people I know. Doesn’t anyone care about anything that matters? Doesn’t anyone give a shit about being a little informed? Why are bullshit distractions like myspace and perezhilton completely consuming the collective conscience of this country? Sincerity has been replaced by snarkiness and caring about issues is now fodder for ironic parody.

This would have embarrased me 20 years ago

I was sitting in class last week. As I was rifling through my bag, which by this point in the semester is a train wreck of papers, books, pens, lip balms, loose change, and a sole o.b. tampon.
In the flurry or activity, I dropped the bag on the floor, and a tampon spilled out and rolled across the floor in a lecture room on the 2nd floor of the Ruth Adams building.

Now, if this had happened when I attended community college in the late 80’s I probably would have been mortified and quite possibly, shed a tear over this.

Last week however,  it barely even registered a change in pulse or blood pressure.  I’m a chick. I’m 38. I still get my period. I use tampons when that happens. Embrace pragmatism.

Going to class in Gen Pop

I’d like to warn everyone contemplating attending Essex County College in Newark, NJ or West Caldwell, NJ, it’s quite possibly the WORST school you could possibly enroll in. Of course, that’s only MY opinion based on MY personal experience.

My experiences there were borderline terrifying. In many classes I heard classmates greet “professors” with the following salutation, “Whassup my nigga?”

World Civ Part I.

The first class I took during Summer Session I was World Civilization I. The instructor was an attorney from Paterson I’ll call Ronnie. I’ll call him Ronnie since he often referred to himself in the third person as “Ronnie”. He sort of had this “Supafly Soul Brotha” vibe to him. He had relaxed hair, and wore a ginormous shiny gold chain around his neck. I swear sometimes I think I saw him take off a crushed velvet hat with a peacock feather in it before class.

13th Grade

After I made the hasty decision to go back to college, I needed to decide where exactly I wanted to go. Since most admission departments are dealing with people who take care and patience deciding where they want to go in the last two years of high school, sending in a college application in April wouldn’t alow me to attend summer session classes anywhere. I didn’t have high school transcripts, letters of reference, SAT scores, nada, zip, nothing.

Spring 2006

Let me be honest, my decision to go back to college grew more out of spite and sloth than a desire for personal fulfillment. I had recently quit my low paying go nowhere job and was receiving unemployment. As an added bonus from NJ state taxpayers, I qualified for an additional benefit called Tuition Reimbursement; a social program so progressive it would make FDR jump for joy.

If you were unemployed, you were excused from seeking re-employment if you attended college classes full time. Since I was fully prepared to take the summer off, I wanted to appear as if I were busy. Plus, I also enjoy being an egghead, as much I have the capacity to anyway, so my general lack of ambition and state bureaucracy got married and had a baby in my brain.