Finish my B.A. degree

Classes have not started yet, but beginning one week ago, profs have been emailing syllabi and WebCT links, counselors are emailing with me – albeit with some prodding, all of it. At home I’m adjusting my sleeping schedule and creating my chore routine to fit the new quarter schedule. (I’m not officially added into all the classes I need yet but I know which ones they are, and when they meet, and I’m working with that information). I think saying that a quarter is only ten weeks long is hogwash. It’s still twelve weeks with all the preparations necessary to hit the ground running once classes begin.

There’s something happening at my alma mater also that I’m excited about. Michael Shermer is going to present there in March! SH posted about it on his blog, that’s how I discovered it. I’ve written and asked if I could attend if not also bring a group from CSUB. In addition I’ve written the chairs and directors here at CSUB asking about a potential field trip north. I already know who Shermer is, but I’d love to introduce other people to him and to critical thinking in general, something this area desperately needs.

And I’ll let the world in on one of my personal secrets. I recall the day, as a member of that club, when I suggested bringing Shermer in to speak, and the then-president gave me a horrible and rather insulting row about it. It’s furklempting (Is that a word?) and even reassuring to me that that thought-seed took root in somebody anyway. Someone there, or some group there, took it and ran with it and made it happen, and that’s amazing. That’s how science and how education is supposed to work. Which is likely why I feel like such a fish out of water in Bakersfield. I graduated from one area where students were supported and encouraged to think independently and share ideas and grow together, and for whatever the woo’s reason, I ended up in a stale, infertile environment where students are stripped of their individual identities and bent to the will of their corporate masters.* And I’m having none of it because I’ve already seen for myself, while attending school upstate, what I’m capable of. They want to beat me into submission and I’m not having it, and that makes me a “problem student.”

_{*borrowed from George Carlin}

Sort of. It’s crap that I hope they will work with, and not throw back at me. :)

I took my required classes in applied experience last quarter. Details about them are in other posts. I earned credit for the seminar but did not earn the credits for the job because the job didn’t work out. Before these grades were assigned, I received complaints from the department that it was important for them to be represented well by its students and that I needed to do whatever it took to finish the work with the job supervisor. Using much more diplomatic language than I am writing here, I reminded them that there is squat for student help at this campus and that I have been left to figure everything out on my own, and if that is how our Chancellor wants to run the system and how our state wants to fund it, then I will be making mistakes like this as I try to teach myself how to be a student. I did not receive a reply but I did receive credit for the seminar.

I very much doubt I am the only disadvantaged student at this campus, but I often feel like I’m the only one making any noise about getting blamed for how things are running. It isn’t the students’ faults. I don’t like my numbers either. I’m the one that gets to explain in graduate admissions essays why my transcripts are the way they are, why I was never handpicked for assistanceships or a senior thesis, and why I have no recomendation letters, and to somehow artfully do so without sounding like I’m blaming other people for a severe lack of investment in students’ potentials. This campus is not student-oriented. At all. I was missinformed by their literature and I still feel like I would have gotten a better education somewhere else. I really wish people had spoken up to me about all this before I chose a campus. Because now, every chance I would have had to earn honors and earn a degree I could actually use and be proud of, is shot to hell, and it’s too late to go back.

So if the department isn’t liking the way students are skewing their numbers downward, then they need to help us students make the case. We need to have those student services. Professors can’t shoulder that work, and students don’t automatically know how to. We need those extra programs, even in lowly little Bakersfield. Students here have just as much potential as students anywhere else.

While the details of that trip don’t fit much into this particular goal because it was all to do with earning higher degrees, one thing that has changed as a result of the trip does fit.

The BA is suddenly a mile-marker, no longer a final prize.

At first glance, the syllabus, rules and procedures for the Applied Experience class I’m taking looks, aside from differences in name and the printed layout of the forms, almost exactly like the WEX program at Ohlone that I tutored in. Almost exactly. The time logs, consent forms, learning plans, everything. It’s another of those classes where, if it weren’t for the argument “WEX was lower division and now you have to earn upper division credits so you need to take this class even though the content is similar,” I’d have my coursework in the chair’s office again, and again be challenging the class.

But today, we had the first orientation meeting for all the tutors. The professor in charge of hiring tutors did a little matchmaking, so that interests between tutors and the foster kids are compatible. I can’t post anything about the kids themselves on here because it’s confidential, but this is a brand new age group for me, and it’s beyond academic tutoring. Academics are a priority, but because these are foster kids who don’t have a lot of family support, we do a lot of extracurricular activities and mentoring with them also. I was never in a group home myself, but I can still relate to things like being in extracurriculars where no one comes to support you, or having parties and no one you invited attends, having a birthday no one acknowledges, or having a parent who’s warm one day and cold the next, or acting overly-extraverted in high school to hide my personal problems from friends, constantly moving around and changing schools, and a bunch of other stuff like that. That lack of social validation and lack of stability and steady relationships with people. During the orientation today, I’ve suprised myself; I’m not bitter about all that happening to me (so, parents, take note of that :) ) – rather I can empathize a lot with the stuff these kids go through. Not all of it, but a lot of it. So, while old work skills will apply where tutoring is concerned, and the paperwork will be positively jading, I have a hunch I’m going to learn a lot from working with this group of kids.

And, this is a point in time where it benefits me to live where I live, where I’ve seen and talked to both kids and parents who deal with each other in troubled homes. I can draw from that as well.

Financial aid messed up in paying out my Stafford loan. Long story. It’s going to take another week. I don’t have my books yet, and the professor can’t post any more chapters on WebCT because of copyright laws. I have an assignment due tomorrow, which consists of questions about Chapter 3 of one of those textbooks, and I have no way of answering them because I can’t buy the book, nor can I borrow someone else’s because everyone’s gone home by now. So for reasons I can’t control, I’m going to get a big fat zero on that assignment and probably every assignment from now until I’m able to buy books. The first midterm would be one of them. My only saving grace would be if the course content, at leat in these earlier weeks, is in fact the same as stuff I’ve already learned like I posted about before. That’s a serious gamble, though, when I haven’t actually seen or read the books.

This is one of those times when I think the costs are outweighing the benefits. Why is there all this unnecessary stress?

I’m in a reseearch methods class that will ultimately provide an opportunity to investigate more into my hunch about animal hoarding. But this same class, currently this week, is reviewing once again how to write a paper in APA format, how to use PSYCinfo for research, how to think critically, who James Randi is, how not to refer to articles that are not peer reviewed, the same crap that the professors here think students don’t learn until they get to this class, but that I actually learned in junior college and then put into practice as a psychology TA for two years. It’s bloody insulting.

I’m in a painting class also, which is junior-level, which I’m taking because I need those particular credits for that major. So at least in that class, I’m entering it with the understanding that it’s below my level. I sit through the lectures on painting techniques that I don’t need, but the plus side is that it’s kinda nice to be assigned something to paint, and having rules to work with, rather than having to design the entire project on my own like I had to for the senior thesis. There’s no pressure, so the class is a bit relaxing.

In either of these classes, I’m hoping for opportunities to lead study groups. I learn much more about a subject when I can teach it to others, because you have to know it in order to teach it. It’s how I aced psychology before. But the trouble I have, being ADHD, is avoiding getting so bored with the repetition that I start to avoid the work and then end up failing. I have to search for something challenging about it.

It isn’t to learn anything new at all. It’s just to document the stuff that you already know.

I’ll be challenged a bit in research methods, primarily due to the sheer amount of work, but I won’t be learning any new material at all in any of my classes this quarter. Just proving that I know it and making it look good on paper.

Kind of a waste of $40,000, if you ask me. Can someone out there remind me why I’m doing this?

I interviewed today for a position as an after-school tutor for foster kids. And I got it. So I will be earning my Aplied Experience credit in exchange for this work. After this quarter, if the kids like me, they will consider hiring me as a paid intern until the end of the school year. Which rocks!

Aparently, the purpose of a BA degree isn’t to learn about your chosen major, as much as proving to the world that you can put your shoulder to the grind and get things done no matter the circumstances.

I thought I already did this in earning my Associate’s degree! I transfered out with intent to build on what I’d already learned, and instead I’m having to spend a lot of time and energy proving to a new group of people, what I’d already proved at the other college! They won’t even look at anything I’ve done, no references, no recomendations, no resumes, nothing at all. I had to start all over from the very beginning.

Sigh. It’s very Jacob and Rachel.

I only need one elective and my Senior Exam.