How Hard Can It Be?
Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
Robert Frost
We dropped my grandson off for his first year at Snow College yesterday. He may or may not have had a tear or two glistening in his eyes as we disappeared around the corner. It’s a big step. And sometimes a scary one. When my parents deposited me at my off-campus BYU apartment a week earlier than my sophomore roommates, I spent several days all by myself. My only company was the team I had been assigned to for Freshman Orientation. Tears were involved in that transition, too.
My own children had varying degrees of success with their adventures in higher education. My favorite was when Son #5 headed over to register for a semester of classes at Salt Lake Community College before his mission. He was gone quite a while. Since he’d much preferred basketball and water polo to any kind of academic focus, I was pretty curious about what classes he would choose to take. Hence, I was waiting at the door when he got home. “So,” I said. “What’d you sign up for?”
“Well, Mom,” he answered. “I read the whole book of class offerings and nothing sounded really interesting. So, I signed up for volleyball.”
“Great,” I said. “What else?”
“Just volleyball.” Then he wandered off. Fortunately, two years in Costa Rica, some of it working closely with a humanitarian missionary nurse, peaked his interest. That and his wife insisting he provide a healthy life insurance policy to balance out his extreme sports hobbies. Now when he talks to a couple of his siblings who are also in the medical field, it involves a lot of words I’ve never heard, but he’s useful when I need either a Spanish translation or an explanation of my CT scan results.
Son #6 never actually spent much time in a college classroom. I understand students in his computer technology classes called him “the Ghost” because he was famous for only showing up for the midterm and the final. Everything else he did online—a foreshadowing of pandemic education, perhaps? Working at home is nothing new for him. He did most of his college homework at two in the morning. He and his family are currently staying in my basement until their new house is done. From the looks of things, his work hours haven’t changed much.
I read somewhere that the average college student changes her major as many as seven times. Unlike some of my children, I figured out I wanted to teach people stories by the time I was four when I began lining up my brother and my stuffed animals for “school”. My Raggedy Ann and Andy students were much better behaved than my one-year old brother. I started college at age 17, registered Language Arts Education as my major, and didn’t stop till I finished. My dad told me years afterward that he had thought I was “copping out” by becoming an English teacher—when, in his opinion, I had the brains and the talent to do something considerably more demanding like nuclear physics, for instance. (He admits he may have been slightly biased in my favor!)
Of course, he was partly responsible for the myth surrounding my “exceptional” intelligence. When he retired from the Air Force and finished his doctorate, part of his program required that he learn to use a whole raft of educational testing tools—including several IQ tests which were popular at the time. Scoring those tests before the assistance of computers was an arduous time-consuming process, so my dad hired me to do the slave labor of applying the templates and recording the information. He used that data to compile his analysis of each client’s intellectual capacity. After more than 200 tests, I had memorized quite a few answers.
Fast forward to starting my senior year at the fourth high school I’d attended in as many years. Wouldn’t you know it? The school assessed all their seniors for college readiness by giving them an IQ test—one I had scored many times. It would be an understatement to say I did very well. As soon as the scores became available, the principal called my dad personally to congratulate him on his truly “exceptional” daughter. He gushed on and on about his high school housing students whose parents were scientists at Sandia Labs–one of the premier research labs in the country, Lovelace Clinic–which did all the medical workups for the astronaut program, a Naval Air station and an Air Force fighter base—both of which had several hundred pilots—all with college degrees. Of the 1,000 seniors in the school, more than half were members of the National Honor Society. He finished up telling my dad what an honor it was to have such a talented new student as a member of their graduating class.
My dad winked at me as he listened and nodded his head. Now and then he’d insert a comment or a word of agreement. But he never gave even a hint of explanation. When your parents are happy to help everyone believe you’re a genius, college turns out to be a lot easier than you anticipated.