Back to School: Report #2

Not much has changed since my first time in college, but occasionally something happens that makes me feel 1,000 years older than most of the other students (though there is a person or two my age and older in all my classes, excepting the 101s). I don't feel much distance between my decrepit 30-year-old ass and their firm, luscious 20-year-old asses, but for whatever reason, many of these younger students' cultural references either don't extend past 1998 or are chronologically confused.
Example #1: In my post-Harlem Renaissance African-American lit class, I worked on a group project about blues music of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s and its relation to Zora Neale Hurston's prose. During a group meeting, a girl said, "Roberta Flack might be a good example. She was right around this time period, right? Or was she a little later?"
Example #2: In my American Lit class, we watched the first fifteen minutes of Peter Bogdanovich's Daisy Miller after reading the Henry James story. In the film, Daisy's little brother was played by Larry McMurtry's son James, who is currently an Austin singer-songwriter. The professor told us that the young actor grew up to be a musician and asked us if we knew who it was. One of my fellow students said, "Neil Young?" Keep in mind, he'd already told us the year of the movie's release, 1974.
Example #3: In my enormous 500-student psychology class, one of the two professors asked the lecture hall how many of us had seen A Clockwork Orange? Only about 30 people raised their hands.

I don't think it's necessary, or even that important, to have a rough estimate of when Roberta Flack's career began or how old Neil Young was in 1974, or to have seen the Kubrick film (his worst, in my opinion, though very appealing to people in their late teens and early twenties and extremely popular with that age bracket the last time I was in that age bracket, which I didn't think was that long ago but apparently some cultural shift has taken place and maybe these kids are all really into Barry Lyndon). I don't think knowing pop culture details and approximate dates makes anyone smart. I'm just surprised. Middle-aged co-workers at my last job were always saying things to me like, "You're probably too young to have ever heard of Jack Benny/Nina Simone/Paul Simon/Spiro Agnew, etc." and I was always taken aback by that. I always assume people are aware of at least a few things that predated their births. I mean, come on. By their logic, no one alive should have the slightest fucking clue who William Shakespeare or Abraham Lincoln are. Civil War? Never heard of it. Who the fuck are The Beatles? Spare me your arcane minutiae, Pops. This is the nineties. But maybe my middle-aged coworkers were right to assume I'd never heard of anything that predated 1977. Maybe my friends and I are Paleolithic weirdos for being interested in things that happened prior to "Desperate Housewives." But in my culturally deprived small Midwestern hometown in the early 1990s in the adolescent world of immediate-present-only, we watched Cheech and Chong movies, listened to Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, and knew that Roberta Flack was not an early 20th century blues singer. It wasn't all Alice in Chains, Encino Man, Bell Biv Devoe, Lorena Bobbitt jokes, and Clearly Canadian. We didn't live in a total vacuum. Does anyone remember John Tesh? Is there anybody out there who remembers "Manimal"? I have been left behind. Kool and the Gang are contemporaries of Emily Dickinson in the world of today's youth. My beer gut grows larger as my capacity to learn new technologies diminishes. The Grim Reaper takes my hand, and I sing Kajagoogoo's "Too Shy" as I slowly shuffle toward my demise. Remember me as someone who experienced my pop culture firsthand, not through Peter Griffin. Fuck the police. Welcome to the jungle. Do you like pina coladas?

Back to school: report #1

This back-to-school thing is pretty weird. It would be less weird if I was a graduate student, but getting another undergrad degree is weird-beard TNT. Here's where it's OK: My teaching classes are full of people my age, older, and slightly younger, so that's not weird at all. It's nice having an age range of 19-50 in one classroom. My English classes are good. I get to read a lot of stuff I would probably have read anyway, or not read but wanted to, or not thought to have read, or hadn't heard of, or already read but wouldn't have re-read. My previous degree took care of the beginning English classes, so I'm only taking upper-class stuff. People in their early twenties are fine. I don't feel too far removed from them, and they seem okay. Here's where I'm struggling and feeling angry, stupid, sad, bored, and exasperated: the handful of generals I'm forced to take. I'm finding the 101 classes to be about the most difficult things I've ever done. I think something happens to your brain around age 25 that makes it harder to engage in rote memorization and test-taking. I'm having trouble memorizing things I don't care about. I always had that problem, but I could do it if I had to and crammed enough. Now, it's a goddamn insurmountable hurdle. I already paid these dues, motherfucker. And now my decrepit 30-year-old brain can only memorize facts I actually give a shit about. And I think I hate 18- and 19-year-olds more than any group of people on the planet. That may sound funny coming from someone who is planning on teaching high school, but there is a huge difference between a high school senior and a college freshman. Goofy, awkward teenager turns, overnight, into goofy, awkward teenager with responsibilities. Somehow, adult freedom turns these teenagers into jerks. And not just jerks. Stupid jerks. And these 101 teachers gear their lessons to these stupid jerks, and not the 30-year-old jerks like me, who really should have figured out what the fuck to do with their lives several years ago so they wouldn't be sitting in the same seat they were sitting in 12 years ago. For chrissakes, OJ Simpson is involved in another criminal imbroglio. It's 1995 all over again, and I have progressed exactly one inch since I graduated from high school. If Candlebox puts out a new album, I will commit suicide.

So, I'm pretty much going to have to drop my biology class because I'm a fucking idiot and not a visual learner and I'm too fucking old to be there, but I had my first classroom observation last week and I loved it. That made me feel good. Maybe I'm on the right track, even if I have to take three science classes, and Psychology 101, and an online Texas government whoop-di-do, and my old college roommates are well on their ways to Ph.D.'s while I sit in fucking Biology 101, completely lost. What fucking balderdash. Folderol! Fuck! Anyway, I observed a fourth-grade class, and will observe this class for nine more weeks, and it's nice to actually be reminded why I made this rough, tough, and undignified decision to play 18-year-old for the first three years of my thirties. (Although I have spent the last six years drinking beer, buying records, and going to movies while they worked their asses off.) A Reader's Digest condensed version of my first classroom observation.
Boy in John Cena shirt and girl with frizzy, curly hair staring at me in the office of the school.
Girl: We're half cousins.
They lead me to the classroom. I notice that we leave the school and are walking toward some kind of weird back entrance that doesn't look like where we are supposed to be.
Boy: We like going this way but lately they've been locking the doors.
The door is locked. The boy and the girl stand in front of the door for 30 seconds.
Me: Is there another way in?
Boy: Yeah, this way.
He leads me through doors that put us right where we were to begin with, and then to the classroom, which is just down the hall.
The teacher introduces me to the class, I tell them some things about myself. They introduce themselves to me. About half of them are shy and embarrassed, the other half outgoing and happy. One boy pumps his fist in the air and says the following: My name is Kevin. Yodelay-yi! Yodelay-yi! Yodelay-yi-hoo!
The whole class laughs, except for one surly young man with his arms crossed. He says: Yeah, he's funny. He's funny. He's funny. He's not funny.
Girl: He is too funny.
Boy: Shut up.
They discuss a short story they read the previous week. The teacher reads a passage describing a boy dressing for winter. When she reads the words "long underwear," the class explodes in laughter.
I like these kids.

Campus report: Current indie-rock fashion may be changing, if UT trends can be believed. I thought campus would be overrun with asexual anorexics in tight, ill-fitting, multi-colored clothes, sneering at everyone while sharing a single Ramen noodle. I've only seen two of these butt-nuts in 4 weeks. Oddly, everyone looks the same at the University of Texas as they did at the University of Nebraska 8 years ago, except that shoes are much more colorful, nobody wears flannel, and, of course, iPods are everywhere. Cell phones seem to be less omnipresent than I feared. Everyone carries one, but there's less constant chattering than there was the last time I ventured onto UT premises. That's a good sign. I'm still confused about how the craziest lunatics in town--I'm talking the craziest, the guys who can't figure out how to stop confusing Jesus with Mickey Rooney or stop talking to themselves or stop carrying around 68 plastic bags--can always seem to find a campus student union. If you think bugs are crawling on your skin and your name is 56 Galactitroid, how the fuck do you get it together enough to find the food court at the student union of the university?