I got up super-early today (alarm set for 6 a.m. — which just makes me cringe to admit) and arrived to work well in advance of 8 a.m. because … today’s the first day of classes here at TWU! It’s always a hectic day on campus, replete with parking woes and lost/dazed/confused students, but it’s also a day filled with the energy and vitality the campus slowly sheds over the course of summer semesters. I walked over to the student center this morning (to buy my books — more on that later), and was amazed at how many students were shuffling through the halls and looking, panicked, at the parking lot.
Being out on campus today reminds me why I work in higher education. TWU is a nontraditional school; we’re largely a campus of commuter students who don’t fit the typical 18-22 college student demographic. We’re about half graduate students. So as I walked around, I didn’t see a lot of the fresh-faced freshman giddiness others across town at UNT might have witnessed.
Still, what always runs through my mind when I reflect on the nature of my work is the reality of what happens here. Higher education changes peoples’ lives, and unlike public education at the K-12 level, higher education is available to those who ask for it. When I taught, I took incredible delight in saying, “If you don’t want to come to class, don’t come; I don’t take attendance and I don’t count off for absences.” College students are adults capable of navigating their own lives how they see fit; as a staff member at a university, I work within a system that gives (on demand) people the tools and resources to better themselves — and the world, by extension.
Of course, I have a particularly soft spot in my heart for higher ed, since it’s meant so much to me in my life as a student. People love to tease me about my obsessive class taking, and that’s OK; I know I’m weird, and I don’t care. 🙂 I wouldn’t mind, however, if textbooks weren’t so dang expensive (or if I didn’t have to buy three per class when all three appear to be on the same topic). I haven’t spent this much on books in a single semester since I was an undergrad attempting 18 hours a semester — if then! Sheesh!
But I like weird 🙂 I have the same thoughts but not the direct drive to accomplish what you have. I have always said that if I was independently wealthy I would just go to school all the time, first to get a degree than just for fun. If we are here on the planet for anything it is to learn. Well and travel, and possibly for sex too; preferable while we travel. Anyways going to school for fun will never being weird; believing that you have nothing else to learn is weird.