Back to School: it ain’t what it used to be

The economy is bad (or so the experts say) and my employer felt that my position had to be eliminated.* Faced with the option of paying off my student loans with no income, I decided to delay the inevitable and return to school full time. It doesn’t seem that long since I was a full-time student, but considering “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire” was popular and “Dawson’s Creek” was still on the air, I guess it has. The year was 2003 and I was finishing up my final college semester by sleeping through boring, pointless classes.

The biggest thing that has changed is the technology. I wrote about this a few months back, but it’s even greater than I realized. Back in 2003, I was a major email-user; unfortunately, the majority of my teachers were not. Very few were willing to communicate by email; now I have teachers insisting that all papers are emailed so we can save trees.

The computer has made everything different. At my school, everything gets done online. You can register for classes, check grades, even pay tuition. None of this was available in 2003. It might not seem like much, but it’s a whole different world–and a lot easier than spending 45 minutes in a line.

My school even has its own version of MySpace–virtual classrooms where students are expected to login and check for homework assignments and download syllabuses. The campus has WiFi available in every classroom. Almost everyone brings a laptop. I remember when I use to duck into the library when I had a half-hour to kill so I could read the virtual news on Yahoo! (or check my fantasy baseball team). Now, I’m doing it at my desk…during a lecture.

It’s only been six years. Six years isn’t that long. Yet in the world of technology, it’s like a millennium. I always was a computer geek and well-versed in things like WiFi and email back in 2003. I always felt the school and the teachers were the dinosaurs–they were the ones not moving forward with technology. It’s nice to know that it only took them six years to embrace it.

Something else has changed since 2003: me. In the past six years, I rarely wrote anything longer than a grocery list (that’s not true: thanks to email, I’ve been typing grocery lists on my phone for five years). So imagine how I felt during the first day of class trying to write down what the teacher said and try to take notes? My hand cramped up about 20 words into it. I know as you get older, you get outta shape…but this is ridiculous. Who ever thought one would hafta get into academic shape to go back to school?

Hand writing things won’t be my only problem: I’m also gonna hafta relearn proper English. When I started to develop my own writing style, I invented a lot of words and intentionally ignored many rules of proper grammar. I did so under the guise of ‘creative license’ (my favorite term learned throughout my writing courses). Since graduation, I’ve refined my style and truly become one with it. I’ll use the word “shouldn’tve” in sentence without thinking twice. Hell, my custom dictionary in Microsoft Office has over 600 words. I’m good at what I do…and disappointing grammar teachers with every word I write.

Now that I gotta start turning in term papers and impressing professors, I gotta resort back to proper English (APA? MLA? WTF?). We’re talking about undoing six years of bad habits (ten if you wanna go back to when I started writing). I love contractions: to know I can’t use ’em brings a tear to my eye. I’m gonna hafta start distinguishing the difference between colons and dashes. I’m gonna hafta stop using words like ‘gonna’ and ‘hafta.’

This is gonna be hella hard.

*I was laid off: not fired. If I was fired, they would have never been able to find someone else to sit around and do nothing all day for less than what they paid me.