Well, I didn’t make it to America. My four weeks off from class were blissful, but I had a nagging cold for three of those four weeks. It wasn’t omicron, just a good old-fashioned cold, which sucked enough for me to decided to cancel (or postpone, we’ll see) my R&R. I had something planned in DC and that got pushed back indefinitely and the only other thing was to drive to see family across multiple states, which didn’t seem like the brightest of ideas during a hot wave of COVID, even if that particular wave seems to be more like a bad cold or the flu than anything else.
Either way, I canceled my seat on the charter flight a couple
days before and tried to mentally prepare to start the last class. As it’s
turned out, I’m glad I opted to stay because during the time I would have been
traveling, I wound up having two mandatory calls with the professor. Now I am
two weeks in just hate it so much.
What is it with academia that in no way mirrors the real
world? We are supposed to do some kind of paper (25 pages, and it’s only worth
half the grade) on exploring some problem for change, or something like that,
and recommending what to do. This is completely at odds at what I do, which I
am good at: fixing problems. Not recommending things, just doing it.
I’ve got a “change” in mind, but the professor keeps saying that
it has to be something that affects us, that we have the power to change, etc.
Um, I have no power and I work for the federal government. If there was some
kind of change I really could propose to someone who’d hear me out and that
person could champion it, it would still be eight years before anything
happened.
Immediate results? I get this degree and take a long hot
bath. That’s my goal. It’s not academic, but neither am I. I’m a practical
person who works in the real world.
In my class, I’m not the only one. Several of us were on a
call with the professor yesterday and one, who’s struggling like I and other
are, mentioned something about being tied to a particular expertise she’s
developed over a 17-year career with the same federal agency. The teacher said,
“Why don’t you just quit?”
All of us on the call, I think, were too flabbergasted to
respond, but the professor pushed on, telling this 55-year-old professional,
who’s a wife, a mom and a grandmother, that she should just quit and go to work
“in academia; there are lots of jobs in HR.” Um … she doesn’t want to start a
brand-new career at $17 an hour, even if there were “lots” of options in her
particular geographic area. She’s happy where she is; she just wants to expand
a bit.
The professor’s comments shocked me and others and it
reinforced how out of touch she is with the real world. I felt so bad for the adult
student; it was just such an inappropriate comment to make and no one, including
her, could formulate a response as the professor went on and on about how, if
this student wanted a job in HR, she didn’t just walk away from her 17-year
career and into the unknown. It wasn’t like “put down your nets and follow me,”
but just going on about how easy HR jobs were to find, which is not true if you
have zero experience in it – especially when you’re trying to move to a new employer.
Gosh, it was just weird.
The class is only eight weeks long and will one day be over,
but until it is, the name of the game is misery. I really don’t understand what
it is I’m supposed to do, despite three conversations with the professor and
several other email exchanges. Once I get a grasp on it, I have to crank it
out. The draft is due in the seventh week, which is just over a month away. As
much as I want to get to the finish line, I’m really not making a lot of
progress.
My days now consist of an hour in the morning in the gym or
something, then breakfast and then work. After work, I come home and slave over
it, except I haven’t made it to the paper at night. There’s still a class in
addition to this behemoth, and the weekly papers and discussions account for 50
percent of the final grade. Which, BTW, I don’t care about. I’ve already
emailed my advisor to ask what the lowest passing grade is for a class, but I
haven’t gotten a response yet. Although I’d like a decent grade, my sanity may
not be worth the tradeoff. I just want it done.
The discussions themselves wear me out because I just don’t
really understand what I’m supposed to be doing. The last one was what my
takeaways were and I noticed most people basically summarized the material,
whereas I selected a couple of, well, takeaways.
That’s the practical realist in me; I just don’t have a grasp on the fantasy world of academia.
