Over at Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and Walter Dellinger pre-emptively discuss the possibility that racial “preferences” used by Louisville and Seattle to enforce a “minimum” and “maximum” African-American presence in each school (while conveniently neglecting to watch other races) might be struck down as unconstitutional. Both opposed the idea.

The eventual decision (by 5-4 ruling, as most of this term’s have been) was that opponents were right. I think Justice Kennedy’s line was the best: “Crude measures of this sort [as illustrated in this case] threaten to reduce children to racial chits valued and traded according to one school’s supply and another’s demand.”

Where I grew up, there was a forced busing system actually worse than Louisville’s. Instead of being limited to within ISD districts, it actually was an “exchange” system; students from certain districts with high minority populations were bussed out to less-populated suburban districts. The results were staggering, and I’m confident in saying not helpful.

But I don’t think the results actually had anything to do with race.

The actual results of the program, which may or may not still exist (and hopefully will die with this decision if it does still exist) were the following:

– Increase in violence and gang activity in the suburban schools.
– Decreased involvement by parents and bussed kids alike in school programs.

By the time I was of high school age, these were bad enough for the local high school that my parents sent me to a private school (another 7 miles away). The high school had had at least one violent incident involving a weapon every week.

However, I believe that neither of these complaints has a direct relation to race. For the first, if a majority of kids were from any low-income area (“white trash”, latino, asian, black) there would likely be a larger number of latchkey kids, bad parents, violent behavior, and yes, crime and gangs and drugs.

For the second, I believe the primary problem was partially the income of parents, but also partially the onerous nature of the busing program. When kids are near a school, or “nearer” compared to a 3-hour bus ride, it’s not as far for parents to pick them up after school events. It’s not as far for parents to drop them off early. And it’s an extra amount of time for parents to drive to make it to games and cheer their kids on, and then bring them home again.

Even if the 3-hour bus trip equates to a normal 30-minute ride (and my parents usually dropped me off rather than have me have to sit and wait for a bus that took 2 hours to make what would have been a 30-minute bicycle ride, 15 in the car), that’s an hour lost from someone’s day trying to participate in these extra things. It’s harder for them to make it to parent-teacher conference night, harder for them to be there for band practice or sports programs, harder for them to be there even for a school dance. It’s also an hour of lost sleep, or lost potential study time, for the child.

And that’s setting aside the fact that school buses, even more than the school building themselves, are havens for a Lord of the Flies mentality – bored kids sitting in a confined space, with nothing to do but cause trouble and the only “supervision” an adult whose primary point of attention is not the kids, but the road. A lot of damage can be done to kids on a bus, and the longer the bus trip, the worse it gets.

The end result is a net loss for the kids on both sides of the equation. The school attendance numbers may not change, but the school community numbers do.

By way of Phi I ran across a discussion on the pro’s and con’s of homeschooling.

If/when Clancy and I have kids, homeschooling is an option that will be on the table. It will depend in large part what kind of public education system there is wherever it is we end up.

Dizzy, who was homeschooled from the fifth grade through high school, looks at the movement on negative terms:

Honestly, I think the homeschooling movement is a joke. It’s more common now to band homeschooling kids together to learn those subjects – everyone pitches in to hire a tutor or something. So that’s an improvement. And homeschoolers are now allowed to join sports teams in their school district. So that’s better too.

But unless your parents are BRILLIANT, well-educated, and stationed as missionaries in Burma or something, it’s not generaly your best option.

I know two people off the top of my head that were homeschooled and with whom I talked about homeschooling. I asked one of them about his experiences and they were quite positive. He had seven siblings, though, and said that some of his siblings did not fare nearly so well. About half probably did better than they would have in a public school environment and about half did worse. A couple did miserably and were probably irreversibly harmed by it in ways that he did not specify*.

There are a lot of factors to be considered before making the choice on whether or not to homeschool. One of the ones I’ve long considered in the negative category is the lack of socialization. Both Clancy and I have a rather restricted comfort zone and neither of us are particularly extroverted. These social setbacks could be greatly compounded by lack of exposure to other people. If they are disinclined to go out and meet people and they’re not forced to in a school environment, that could be very problematic.

I’ve begun to reconsider this stance, though, and wonder if maybe the social environment of public school is a hindrance. Not only when compared to private schools or better run public schools, but also when compared to lack of exposure overall. I have begun to wonder if I might actually be better socialized had I not gone to school at all.

We all have a tendency to justify or rationalize our negative experiences as learning ones. Often this is justified because we learn from our mistakes. But sometimes we learn the wrong lessons and learning the wrong lesson is usually worse than not having learned any lesson at all because not only do you still need to learn the right lesson, you also need to unlearn the wrong one. Arguably, ignorance is better than misinformation if for no other reason than you’re less likely to act on it.

I was a pretty gregarious kid. I was such a smiley baby that when I was really ill it would have gone unnoticed had it not been accompanied by excessive barfing and weight-loss. To the best of my recollection and from what my parents have told me, this remained true through church-run preschool until late elementary school. As with most people, my junior high years were absolutely miserable. I’d become so jaded that I completely missed out on the social opportunities that I had in high school and beyond.

I don’t want to paint a picture of myself as a depressive socially inept loser because that really wouldn’t be accurate. I am, however, so cautious that being around people is a draining experience. This despite the fact that I can’t even remember the last time I was actually an outcast and if I don’t get along great with people it has more to do with different interests than it does my not knowing how to act. For the most part, I have figured out how to act, how to make friends, and how to avoid annoying people or make enemies. People that get to know me generally like me, though I don’t make that too easy on most people.

But here’s something I’ve only recently figured out: The lessons I’ve learned about how to deal with people were almost entirely learned outside of K-12 and frequently involved unlearning what I learned while I was there. I learned more about how to interact with people from behind a keyboard and monitor than I did in the hallways of my various schools***. I learned how to work with other people only after college**. It took me well into college before I stopped being paranoid that anyone outside my social clique didn’t actively dislike me.

Factor in little league sports and church youth group, I honestly think that I might have been a whole lot better off educated in relative seclusion and given a copy of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and How To Win Friends and Influence People than I was being placed in the high school social environment. The best thing I can say about high school was not the social aspect of it or even the learning****, but rather learning how to operate within a structured environment not to my liking. Two years would have been more than sufficient for that.

My main concern with this, however, is that I shouldn’t universalize from my own experience. K-12 isn’t as ego-deflating an experience for everyone as it was for me. Indeed, had I never put on a lot of weight it may never have been that bad for me (though I don’t think it would have helped all that much). As my friend’s siblings’ experiences point out, it’s not for everyone developmentally. I also have another object lesson that may or may not be relevent to homeschooling and social problems: Walt was homeschooled.

* – Knowing what I do of at least one of his siblings, this problem was likely related to social development. She did not do well in any interaction that isn’t 1-on-1 or generally intimate. She got to college and was lost.

** – I could have learned a lot more than I did in high school as I started losing weight and make more friendly acquaintances, but by that point I was so jaded that I was oblivious to the opportunities that I had. I can’t believe that I didn’t realize that certain girls may have liked me and a lot of guys would have wanted to be my friend.

*** – In K-12+BS I was constantly stuck in the default group of people that couldn’t find other people to be with. They were generally not people that I would trust with my grades so I did most projects on my own for the entire group.

**** – I’m the kind of person who more-or-less ignored what the teacher was talking about and learned by teaching myself or getting help from Dad.

Monica Lewinsky came up in a conversation at Half Sigma and I referred to her as a “pleasant airhead“.

Lewinsky somewhat recently got a Master’s Degree from the London School of Economics, so perhaps I shouldn’t use the word “airhead” to describe her.

I don’t know much about the London School of Economics, but it was the school used in two political TV shows for opposite effect. The West Wing had Jed Bartlet as a student at the LSE before going on to win a Nobel Prize and become President of the United States. One gets the impression that he was a pretty bright guy and that the fact that he went to the London School of Economics is emblematic of that. I certainly got the impression that it was a pretty elite place.

Another fictional attendee of the LSE, however, is British Prime Minister Jim Hacker from Yes, (Prime) Minister. In that series the LSE was the butt of jokes. One imagines that if they were to have translated that series over to the US they would have use some state or directional school in its place.

Greenwood Hall, where Hubert and I and company stayed at Southern Tech, the rooming situation was (for the most part) two roommates per room and two rooms per bathroom (connected both by each having a door into the bathroom and by a door between the two that could be locked from either end). When I first started, Hubert had the idea of getting all four beds into one room and and then the other room could be a commons area for everybody.

The problem was that we needed to find four people. We found them in our sophomore year with a couple guys that lived across the hall: Dennis and Saresh. All we had to do was convince the two people adjoined with Dennis and Saresh to switch with us. One, Marco, was easy. We got along great with him and assured him that he could hang out in our little arrangement as much as he wanted. The problem was Ahmad, Marco’s randomly assigned roommate.

Our dislike for Ahmad was instant. We tried to get to know him and befriend him, but he made it difficult. Hubert gave him a tour of the dorms, including our own. He had a derogatory attitude towards our television, towards our room decoration, and just about everything. We wanted to like him and offer him the same deal as Marco, but he had no use for us and it didn’t take long for us to have no use for him.

Except that we did have a use for him. We needed to get him to change rooms with us.

We tried to befriend him, but that didn’t work. We even tried to intimidate him (“You need friends here,” or something to that effect), which wasn’t our nature. He wouldn’t budge. It wasn’t a matter of him not wanting to repack and unpack his stuff because he barely had any stuff and we volunteered to move it for him. The only reason he gave for the move was that our room was smaller than his, except that the two were absolutely identical. We would bring him measurements, offer to let him watch us measure, and anything else we could think of to convince him, but he would not be convinced. He didn’t want to be convinced, he was just being obstinate.

We got a lucky break when, after a couple of days, Dennis came over exasperated. “Ahmad was in my room! {breathe, breathe} on my computer. {breathe, breathe} Looking at gay porn!”

We asked him to repeat it a couple times just to make sure that we understood him correctly. We did. “Did he see you see him?” we asked.

“Yeah, but I bolted out of there before I had time to react.” Dennis was apparently visiting Marco in Marco and Ahmad’s room, so Ahmad thought he had the room to himself. Dennis discovered him walking through the adjoining door (which faced directly at Dennis’s computer) before bolting out, across the hall, and straight to us.

About five minutes late, Ahmad dropped by for a visit. He asked if we had any medicine for a sick stomach because he had just seem something that made him feel sick. He specified that he had seen something on Dennis’s computer. He was sent a link in email that he followed. He saw it for an instant and it made him sick. We might have even believed him had he not gone on so long about it. We recommended some Sprite and the next opportunity we had we checked the history on Dennis’s computer. It was more than a single site that he had visited. He had downright surfed.

The ironic thing is that between us, Hugh, Dennis, Saresh, Marco, and myself, none of us were hostile to homosexuality. Though our politics all differed, we did agree on that. We never outright threatened to out Ahmad, though we did not tell him that we wouldn’t. We already were not in the habit of making conversation with him or talking things out. We didn’t have to blackmail him, though. The next day he paid us a visit and volunteered to switch rooms. And that was the end of that.

Were he not such a disagreeable person, I might have felt some sympathy for him. It can’t be easy to be bi-curious (which he was at the very least) coming from such a conservative background. I hated the idea of taking advantage of that insecurity. But at the end of the day I just didn’t like him and my sympathy was outweighed by my dislike for him. Ahmad acclimated himself to college and dorm life well. He loosened up up a bit, started dressing a little pre-metrosexualish. It was eventually established that he was a gay-leaning bisexual and that persona ended up landing him a coterie of girl friends.

After the room-switch we never really spoke to him again.

A couple other interesting tidbits:

The only friend Ahmad had during all of this was Saresh. This was inconvenient to us because it made Ahmad that much less inclined to switch rooms (because he would be switching away from Saresh) and it meant that Ahmad could be hanging around after all. Ahmad was of Pakistani descent and judging by his accent was not far removed from his ancestral homeland (though his parents were in the US, so he wasn’t an exchange student). Saresh, the fourth person in our arrangement, was of Indian heritage. Dennis pointed out that Indians and Pakistanis hate each other the world over and yet those two had to get along. Their friendship didn’t persevere, however, as Saresh converted to Catholicism and last I knew was on his way to becoming a Catholic priest.

The two guys who were our suitemates before the move were both gay or bisexual. One was an effeminate guy named Gary and the other big guy named Ellis. After the switch, that meant that of the four people in that suite arrangement, three were bisexual or gay. But they all hated one another’s guts. We’d hear them all arguing across the hall.

Throughout high school I kept hearing of this rumor of a short blond-headed girl that had a crush on me. At first I dismissed it, but enough unconnected people mentioned that this girl mentioned me that I figured there had to be some truth to it. The problem was that I didn’t know who it was.

My primary fear was that it was a girl named Andrea Carmine. She was a friend of mine that was short, blond, and strikingly unattractive. I met her while pursuing her friend, but when things didn’t work out with her friend I became friends with Andrew instead. It was a good experience as she was the first female friend I’d ever really had. I wanted to want more, but there was just something spectacularly unattractive about her face that made the thought of kissing her entirely unappealing even though I liked her a great deal otherwise (a lot more than I liked the friend I initially befriended her in pursuit of, actually).

Andrea may or may not have felt that way about me, but I discovered somewhere along the way that even if that was the case she was not the only short blond-headed girl whose attention I captured because Mystery Girl was still riding the bus. Andrea rarely rode the bus at that point and there was no way she rode the bus in particular that my informant rode. I went through the yearbook looking for someone fitting Mystery Girl’s description that I might know and had no luck.

Then one day my senior year my best friend Clint pulled me aside. “I found out who your admirer is. Get this, it’s Jessical Lambrey.”

I’d never had a class with Jessica Lambrey in high school and I hadn’t spoken to her in years. When I looked through the yearbook I must have just glided over her name because of what she said to me the last time we spoke. “I’m sorry, Will, I can’t go with you. My parents won’t let me see boys.”

Jessica Lambrey was the third girl I ever asked out. She said no, giving the exact same excuse that Number Two gave. Number Two, it turned out, was a liar (she was “going with” another boy less than a couple weeks later). I don’t remember what I said when Jessica gave me her excuse. I was probably polite enough to her (I was too scared of girls to be mean to them), though I had some choice words about that liar afterwards.

Though she dropped from my consciousness almost immediately after I asked her out, I didn’t drop from hers. As I would find out years later, I would be the only boy to ever ask her out (at least up till her run-in with Clint). Her father really did forbid her from becoming too close to boys and she hated having to say no. And being sheltered and dateless, she harbored feelings for me for years afterwards. Never enough to approach me or say a single word to me, however. Of course, by the time I found out about it I was spoken for.

There’s a conversation over at Bobvis that’s detoured briefly onto the subject of what exactly happened to some guys to make them feel unworthy of approaching a young woman and asking them out. I commented that the fact that the first seven (or nine, if I could just remember the other two names) rejected me. It reminded me of this little story.

The Nine Strikes when I asked out the first nine girls had a profoundly negative effect on my self-esteem, as one might imagine. Looking back I can see all sorts of things that I missed at the time. I was asking out the wrong girls in the wrong manner. I didn’t realize what exactly was required to get from Point A to Point B. Number One was out of my league by any measure. Number Five was too popular, even if she was fat. Numbers Four and Six were just weird. Number Seven thought I was playing a cruel prank on her by asking her out. And, of course, I was even more clueless than most kids are at that age.

If I had only believed Jessica when she told me why she couldn’t be my girlfriend, I would have been mad about it (“Stupid parents!”) but that alone would have put a serious dent in the hopelessness I felt for the longest time was me. And if nothing else I could have made my first female friend years before I did, learned about girls, and maybe have actually gone out with her whenever the time might have been better.

If only I’d believed what she told me and understood what she never found the guts to later tell me.

As a Quality Assurance Technician, it’s generally a bad idea to mark “FAIL” on something that is actually not incorrect. It’s worse still when not only are they not wrong, but you are wrong. Sort of.

A piece of software that we wrote spelled the word cancelled with one “l”. I have spelled it with two “l”s my entire life, but it’s good to check these things before you send them back so I looked it up and discovered that the English language is retarded. Or I should specify: the English language as spelled by Americans. Apparently the Standard English spelling is with two “l”s (aka “right”) and the Americans decided to go with one (aka wrong).

Why the heck should there be one “l” in cancelled? When a word ends in a single “l” the past tense gets two “l”s, not one. It’s not propeled, it’s propelled. It’s not compeled, it’s compelled. Of course, travelled is actually traveled, but that’s just as retarded as “canceled”. And why should cancelled have one l but cancellation gets two? That doesn’t make sense! Same with trave

Apparently I’m not the only one confused on this issue. A brief look on Google demonstrates that there are over twice as many links with the two-L version than there are with the one-L version. And lest you think it’s because Standard English is that much more common than American English, the American spelling of the word color beat out the British spelling by a 5-to-1 ratio. So I think I can say that there is a distinct possibility that more Americans are spelling the word wrong than are spelling it right. And if Google says it, it must be true!

I think that I’m going to actually stand my ground on this the same way I do for the word “theatre” which just doesn’t work as “theater” as far as I’m concerned. Same with “spectre”, where the American “specter” for some reason makes me think of something that is used to poke something else and not a netherworldly being.

Here are a bunch of other words that the Americans, the English, or the Canadians spell wrong. On a sidenote, though I knew that the Australians used Brit spelling I thought that Canadians tended to use American. Apparently, in their haste to split all differences they take different aspects for each.

In closing I will note that Firefox’s spell checker is going nuts with this post.

Keeping up with the posts on SoTech, I thought I’d offer a quick primer on the dorms they have as such.

First up, we have The Polyhedron. The Polyhedron was built first on SoTech’s campus, back in the 50s. Despite this, it’s probably (overall) the most well-kept of the lot. Solid metal-and-concrete construction, large block exteriors, thick walls, good A/C and ventilation. It’s in The Polyhedron that Greenwood Hall (the Honors dorm that Will and I were in for most of our stays), Lecter Hall, Dredd Hall, Bruno Hall, and Grayson Hall are located. In the normal course of things, Greenwood Hall and Dredd Hall are for Honors students, Bruno Hall is where most of the Assletes (and regrettably, the 1st floor accomodations for handicapped accessibility) are located, and Grayson Hall and Lecter Hall are reserved for the rest who don’t get into a specific one. The rest of the “student athlete” population tends to be in Lecter Hall because Grayson is a 24-hour noise-free zone, something they wouldn’t likely understand or want to be in. During the summers, most of The Polyhedron is turned into paid locations for summer camps, High School Jailbait Cheerleading Camp, and other such events.

Every couple years, they try to “clean” the walls of The Polyhedron, to turn them back to their “natural” coloration. The true natural coloration, however, is Stone Gray. It gets back that way pretty quickly in Colosse’s weather.

The second, and largest-capacity, student housing setup is Sauron Center. Sauron Center is approximately 17 or 18 floors high, and was built in the 70s. It’s more run down than The Polyhedron, the elevators rarely work, and on at least two occasions has been flooded from the top floors downward when some idiot tried to hang their clothing from the emergency fire sprinklers. Sauron Center has another rare feature: students are gender-separated not by suite, but by floor, due to the community bathroom/shower setup.

The third location, built in the early ’80s, is SoTech Plaza. SoTech Plaza is a set of two-story “apartment” setups, with single-person rooms sharing a bathroom. The good news is, you get your own bathroom. The bad news is: everything else. A/C is provided by loud, badly maintained window units, the walls are paper-thin, the metal skeletons are starting to buckle. SoTech Plaza was originally supposed to be a “temporary” setup until newer places were built, at which point it was supposed to be torn down and replaced with a real building, but SoTech are cheap that way and seem to intend to try to patch it until one of the buildings collapses on someone’s head.

The Pines is the fourth location. This was put up in the early 90s, and is what was supposed to replace SoTech Plaza, except that money became tight and they handed the reins over to a private management company to run it as apartments for a while. They got it back about half a decade ago, and seem to be running it about the same as SoTech Plaza now.

Finally, there’s The Forest and The Wood, the two newest ones. Almost brand spanking new, but put up and advertised more as places for the Frat/Sorority types to go than anything for the main student body, because Frat Row is slowly being torn down. They follow much the same philosophy as The Pines, being set up more as apartment complexes (which allow people to remain over summer even if they’re not registered for summer classes) than dorms.

For obvious reasons, Sauron Center is the most inexpensive to live in, and The Forest and The Trees are the most expensive. For those on scholarship, Greenwood is still the place to be.

Web’s post on his experiences with athletes and housing reminds me of my freshman year, which Hugh and I spent in Lecter Hall, the “Athletics Dorm” before moving to Greenwood Hall, the “Honors Dorm”.

For the most part it actually wasn’t that bad. Fortunately for Hugh and I we had one another to room with so we only had to deal with suitemates, who weren’t all that bad all things considered. But even so it was always very… loud. Music was always blaring at volumes that we never experienced in Greenwood. And athletes in general are more loud and rambunctious in their behavior than are honors students or even regular college students.

The worst we ever had was actually with a couple of female athletes across the hall. One of the two was a somewhat quiet, studious sort that defied stereotypes and her roommate was a very loud one that conformed to some rather unfortunate stereotypes about African-American women. I don’t know if the two got along generally or not, but I do know that exams were more than they could bear.

Well, more than the quiet one could. Frustrated with the loudmouth’s lack of an “off switch” the quiet one locked her out of her own dorm. At two in the morning this did not go over well either with the loudmouth or with anyone else on the floor. Studious said that she needed to study and Loudmouth said that she needed to sleep. Studious pointed out that Loudmouth never actually seemed to sleep and therefore was suspicious of that rationale for her to be allowed back into the dorm. Loudmouth disagreed with that assessment and simultaneously compared her to a female dog and a vagina, among other things.

This eventually culminated in the UPD* campus police being called. When they arrived the officer and the loudmouth played a game of “Opposite!”

For instance, the loudmouth would say “Oh my god, you did *not* just tell me to be quiet!” by which we ascertained that the police officer had in fact told her the be quiet. The loudmouth said “You did *not* just force me back on the bed” by which she meant that he had, in fact, physically prevented her from standing up. The climax of the game came when she said “Oh, my god, you did *not* just put handcuffs on me!” and “I am *not* going to put up with this” which meant “You just put handcuffs on me” and “Okay, fine, I’ll calm down” respectively.

The whole thing took a couple of hours. I suppose if this is the worst story I have in Lecter Hall it wasn’t too bad. The worst part about it was the social isolation, really, and constant stream of bass coming from one dorm or another at any given time. On the upshot my suitemate left a primo shirt. I tracked one of the suitemates down the following year. He said that the shirt wasn’t his and the guy he roomed with was in jail. So finders, keepers, I still have that shirt today.

* – Presumably they would shorten the name of the police department and drop the “Southern Tech” from it lest Southern Tech University Police Department be shortened to STUPD.

As Will’s noted before, we both attended Southern Tech. I, upon my graduation, found employment at my alma mater, something I continue to this day. It’s something of a feeling of giving back, something of a rewarding experience (with one or two exceptions, the co-workers are fantastic), and government jobs are always good for job security.

One of the more interesting thing about my position is that it allows me to keep an eye on the student body. My department features a number of degree plans, one of which seems to have none of the graduate-degree potential of the others; I like to call this one “Future Gym Teachers of America.” Whereas most of the other degree plans are dominated by bright kids, this one has the singular distinction of being the home of roughly 50% of the high-profile NCAA athletes for the school. I say “athletes”, but we have a slang term as well, especially come the end of semester and class registration time: “Assletes.”

When I was in the dorms, Will and I had a common friend in Karl. Karl’s troubles with this crowd started early. Southern Tech’s system of assigning roommates is affectionately known as “Roommate Russian Roulette”: they have NO overhead for people to shuffle around, they routinely overbook by 10-20% so that people spend the first couple weeks (or worse) living on cots in the common areas, and in some cases they’ve actually quartered students at another university in another part of town, and bussed them back and forth from there to campus. Getting a roommate transfer (even in conditions where items have been stolen or personal property destroyed) is a matter not of convincing them it’s warranted, but of convincing someone else to trade off in another room.

Karl’s original housing was in the worst section of the dorms, and they gave him an “Asslete” for a roommate; this person ran a nighttime barber business out of their dorm room, and Karl was rightly afraid that the “clients” would walk off with his possessions. This had a highly negative effect on Karl’s studies, but fortunately didn’t last long enough to give him too major of a problem.

When Karl managed (a couple months later) to transfer into the better dorms by moving into the room next door as my suitemate, his studies noticeably improved, because he was able to be in his room with his books and study. This lasted for approximately 1 and a half years.

Then, the housing authority “mysteriously lost” his housing re-signing documents, after cashing his deposit check. They stuck another less-savory individual in Karl’s slot, and moved him to the worst dorm in the place – a dorm known informally as the “Athletics Dorm” but more often referred to in a derogatory reference to a famous movie serial killer the dorm might have been named after. He was shoehorned into a three-person suite, the two others in the place being some of the worst, and yet somehow most representative, examples the Athletics program ever had to offer.

The idea of “College” for Assletes in the Athletics dorm was late-night parties, beer, and skanky girls; basically, it was impossible for Karl to even be in the room, let alone study. He took to spending most of his time in Hugh and Will’s suite, but not managing to study (because his books were in his own room and he usually didn’t want to go back to risk confrontation long enough to get them); at least half the time he crashed on a friend’s floor in our building, because one of their drunken friends was sleeping off their latest binge on his bed, or they were having other “things” going on in the room. At one point, they stole his backpack and one of them toted around a non-house-trained puppy for two days in it, then handed him back his (now thoroughly urine-soaked and beyond salvation) bag without even an apology for the damage.

Regrettably, this was common behavior of student athletes, at least of the high-profile ones. Oddly enough, there was (and remains) an inverse relationship between athletic scholarships and athletic achievement; the brighter the kid, the better grades they made, the more likely they hadn’t gotten an athletic scholarship at all.

Every semester, my department deals with at least 4-5 (this past fall it hit double digits) disciplinary actions concerning cheating on tests. Every semester, all but 1 involves one of the “Assletes.” We’ve had security-camera proof of some of these, and it boggles the mind that they think they’d get away with it.

Every semester as well, a good number of professors get phone calls from the Athletics department concerning team members who are about to fail a class, demanding they be given a minimum grade (usually “C”) or else an “Incomplete” so as not to screw their GPA and fall below eligibility guidelines. These aren’t kids who missed class due to road trips representing the school, but simply kids who couldn’t be bothered to show up for their classes, or do their homework, or their projects, and in some cases who didn’t bother to show up for their finals.

Every semester, the Assletes converge upon the Academic Advisors. The name of the position is not a coincidence: the purpose of Advisors is to give ADVICE, to recommend what courses they take, doublecheck their GPA and recommend they retake something if they didn’t understand it, and make sure they are nominally on-track to graduate when appropriate. The Assletes are given a preferential sign-up time to register for classes that actually (these days) begins before the Honors students. They are given the tools to make sure they have the exact schedule they want, to schedule around their daily practices and whatever else they need. Yet every year, they show up and insist that the Advisors, rather than fulfilling an Advisor role, do it all for them.

It always amazes me how it turns out this way. The largest list of these comes from three teams: Football, Men’s Basketball, and Women’s Basketball. We do not (as a general rule, with only the occasional exception) get these from Soccer, or Volleyball, or Golf, or Swimming, or any of the other sports, but at least a sizable minority of the “scholarship” students from those three seem to think they are entitled to a college degree without ever lifting a finger or exercising a brain cell working for it.

My parents made it very clear that when I graduated from high school I would not be allowed to take a year off, even if I spent it working. Their fear was that once I got out of the school grind I would not want to get back in. It was not without merit and they may have saved my academic career by stepping in. Maybe.

On the other hand is my former roommate Karl. Karl has what is probably the strongest mind of anyone I know in my generation. I don’t always agree with him and I think his thinking has often lead him astray, but the guy is in my mind the very definition of intelligent. His ability to understand and dissect the logical flow of ideas never ceased to amaze me even when I thought he was off his rocker. His early academic career reflected this. He sailed through K-12 and by the time he was 18 had knocked out a couple years worth of college credit.

Unfortunately, by the time I knew him he was worn out. He went from being a star student at a magnet school of smart kids to flunking out of Southern Tech with a GPA closer to 0.0 than 1.0 (out of 4). We say of a lot of people that the problem is that they don’t apply themselves but it always applied particularly to him. The guy didn’t go to class, he slept through tests, and he didn’t write his papers.

He needed a break. But his parents took the same stance that mine did and denied it to him. But unlike the case with me it did his academic career immense harm. Unfortunately, the worse he did the more difficult his parents made it for him. They figured if they pulled him out of the dorms and made him live at home they could make him go to class, but instead they took a kid that couldn’t drag his butt ten minutes across campus and told him he had to commute for 60 minutes instead. It was, as you might expect, disastrous.

After getting kicked out of Sotech, he decided to go to work. It only took a couple jobs for him to realize that how much deeply he was at the mercy of employers without a college degree. He had no options and so he had to endure the unacceptable for as long as he could. After six months or so with the worst employer in all of Colosse he resolved to go back to school. He couldn’t go to Tech so he enrolled at the regional school on the other side of town. So motivated was he that he commuted 90 minutes each way every day until he finally dropped everything to move out there. He was on “B” away from a 4.0 GPA and is now in a Master’s degree astrophysics program at a school with a pretty good reputation out east.

It’s unfortunate that his parents were so insistent that he continue school long after it should have been apparent that it was doing him more harm than good. Unfortunately a lot of parents have this idea that there is nothing worse than either foregoing college temporarily or dropping out. Instead of releasing him to the real world to find out how important that piece of paper was to him they thought they could just tell him over and over again until he got the message. It didn’t work and it was never going to.

This brings up an interesting dilemma if Clancy and I choose to have kids. If my parents had given me more flexibility it’s possible that I would have become a 10-year college student forever chasing that degree rather than someone that graduated in under five years and entered the professional working world. So if our kids are anything like me I would be inclined to push them to go to college even over their reservations. But then I think of Karl and I question the wisdom in that. There are some kids that aren’t cut out for college and there are others that may be cut out for it but aren’t ready for it for one reason or another. It’s putting a lot of faith in a young man or lady to believe that they will naturally see the light and do what they need to do if they want to follow their dreams (unless what they would ultimately like to do does not include a college degree).

However, I also think that one of the problems with my generation (or at least the way my generation was raised) is that we were often deemed unready to make important life choices. Kind of odd to say that after mentioning how tyrannical I would be regarding my kid’s major and college, but for many it’s quite true. But both concerns stem from a fear on my part that a lot of parents are protecting their kids from “the real world” for far too long to the point that “adult responsibilities” don’t actually start occurring until the mid-20’s if they occur at all.

I’ll pick up this discussion tomorrow.