It's my job

This article is a fascinating look at two sisters from a working class background. One went to college, all the way through to a PhD. She now teaches at Yale, albeit off the tenure track with a mountain of debt. The other forewent college and is now making just over minimum wage, but with no debts.

It's an interesting piece I encourage you to read, but the point I want to bring up here is that the sister without a college degree did spend about one semester at community college, only to find out the courses her advisor told her to take didn't count toward her degree. The very first commenter said: "[She] should have read the catalog and challenged the advice of the adviser.  Or hired a lawyer to sue the institution for giving costly bad advice."

Someone responded:

I come from a blue collar neighborhood in a big city, from which very few young people move on to college--and there's definitely a huge difference in social and cultural capital between those who have parents who went to college and those who don't (no matter how "smart" the actual young person is). It's actually extremely difficult to know how to work within/challenge/stand up for yourself in a large bureaucracy like a university. I'm lucky that my dad actually works at a university and had implicitly taught us kids "the system" so that I am confident and capable enough to navigate it on my own.

As a faculty member, the most terrifying aspect of my job is advising. I have a few students who have memorized the catalog, and a few more who argue because they want to get out of things, but the large majority of them simply take my word as gospel. Many of them not only expect me to know what they need to graduate and what courses have prereqs, but to tell them exactly what classes they should take next semester. I could tell them they need to go to a local CC and take advanced calculus, and they would.

It's not that they're stupid or lazy. It's that I'm supposed to be the expert.

Which is funny, when you think of it. Since faculty don't advise first-year students, all of my advisees have been here longer than me. At first, nearly every question they asked me, I had to field to someone else. I still do, sometimes - we have several versions of the marketing and management curricula that haven't graduated out yet. I worry that I will tell a student the wrong thing, and they'll end up a class short, or missing a required course. Because if I tell them something, they'll believe it.

I'm getting tired of the discourse that says, "Potential college students should make themselves experts in financial aid, loan repayment, career opportunities for several majors, accreditation, and their chosen college's policies." Otherwise, you know, if they get screwed it's all their own fault.

Looking back to when I was their age, what did I know? Financial aid - get it. Loans - don't. My major - I was going to be an English professor, and they were predicting a faculty shortage. (Yeah, remember that one? Sigh.) Accreditation - huh? College policies - OK, I thumbed that thing ragged. But I had college-educated parents, including a mom who did vigorous research on colleges - in the pre-internet era, when that meant buying books rather than surfing the web, and I still didn't know half of what today's advocates of responsibility would have our students know.

I don't advocate for student ignorance, of course. But it's the job of colleges - and states and associations that watch over them - to make information available in a readily understood way. It's our job to watch over and inform these students. They shouldn't have to be Sherlock Holmes or naturally rebellious to make it through college with their wallets and prospects intact.

First-world money problems

I've been trying a horrible new plan lately called living within my means. It's quite barbarous; I only buy goods or services if I have the money in my checking account. Not if I'll get the money next week, or if it's in savings, or if I can put it on a credit card.*

It's all part of my master plan to pay off my credit cards, but it sucks. I need a haircut, but I don't have the money. (No way can I afford a new dye job, too.) I'm even feeling too broke to do real grocery shopping.

Now, I know this is only a tough moment. It's part of the incredible suckitude of being paid every two weeks. I hate being paid biweekly. Bills don't come that way; they arrive monthly, which is not the same as every two paychecks. You can only avoid temporary shortfalls by having a considerable cushion in checking. People like me, who tend to spend what we have, don't leave cushions.

So, for example, my most recent paycheck went to rent. Which meant the one before it had to go to my April bills. Oh, the money is technically still in checking, but it has a big old target painted on it. In two weeks I'll get another paycheck, and it will look like whee-it's-Christmas money, but it isn't.

It shouldn't be like this. With my income, no kids or dependents, and no insane bills**, I shouldn't be living paycheck to paycheck. But the only way to stop living like that is, ironically, to really commit to it for a time so I can get ahead. 

*Naturally, there are (thus far theoretical) exceptions for actual emergencies. I'm not going to die for a balanced budget.
**Yes, I have credit cards. But I don't have unbelievable amounts of student debt or heavy medical bills.

1/4 of the way through the year of women

Some random thoughts:

• It's always weird when a writer you really respect highly recommends a book you think is terribly written
• I loved The Snow Queen, but 150 pages into The Summer Queen I was far too bored to plow through another 550
• I guess I liked Shards of Honor, although I wasn't keen on the smart, intelligent female soldier finding her true life's work as the [SPOILER ALERT] helpmeet to a big guy in a super-patriarchal society
• I can't get into Ursula K. LeGuin as much as I feel like I ought to
• One of the better books I have read, surprisingly, was The Dollmaker. Plus, having spent time in the Big South Fork, it was fascinating to read a novel partially set there
• Yes, at certain bookstores it can be hard to find something to read (if you aren't looking for romance or mysteries)

So say we all

I dreamed the other night that I was in a new version of Battlestar Galactica. With the dream-state ability to hold two seemingly irreconcilable ideas in my head at once, I knew that it was another occurrence of the story told in the TV show, although this was reality. Humanity had actually been pursued to the point of genocide by the creatures of its own creation: All of this had happened before, and all of it would happen again.

This time, things turned out differently than in the recent series. We had colonized a small, undesirable planet to make a go of it, but the Cylons had found us. They reached no truce with us but again tried to exterminate us. Humankind now only numbered a few hundred souls. Our leaders had decided that our species was doomed; the only thing to decide was how we would make our exit. We would do it on our own terms, or at least on the terms of our leaders.

So we had loaded everyone into our last battlestar and set out into space to buy ourselves some distance. The plan was that, at a final signal, all of us would drink a poison and lay down our lives. I may have had misgivings, but no wherewithal for insurrection. The people around me were beginning to go; some could not wait for the final bell and had drunk their kool-aid early. There I was, the stars of space outside, and bodies dying quietly around me. An unusually coherent dream, and if all that is going to happen again, I'd prefer for Captain Adama to save us.

Ground Zero

Reflection, a photo by TheTurducken on Flickr.

My weekend guests wanted to visit Ground Zero, so I went there with them for the first time. What I had heard about the plans for the site had not much impressed me, and after seeing the under-construction towers, I still wasn't architectually overwhelmed. The museum itself looks finished on the outside but isn't open yet. (The photo shows two of the new towers reflected by the museum.)

The pools, however, were another story. Leaping fountains are a happy thing, so it's not uncommon for memorials to feature the still waters of a reflecting pool. The two pools at Ground Zero take another tack altogether. Picture a square hole in the ground - the size of an original towers, with water cascading down the sides. The water pools at the bottom and then in the middle it runs down another square hole. The entire effect is unnerving, not to mention impossible to capture with a still camera. The water looks like a pool of souls falling down into nothingness - not that I've ever seen such a thing to compare it to. It really does capture a feeling of loss.

I've been to a lot of monuments, many for events long past and other within the living memory of some people, although not my own. 9/11 is fresher than that, and when we were in the visitor center, a woman starting sobbing and had to leave. It was wrenching to see that kind of loss up-close. I remember 9/11, and it impacted my life, but I wasn't a New Yorker at the time, nor did I know anyone who died in the attacks. I can only imagine the impact the memorial site would have on those who lost someone.