Tag Archives: college

How to move your kid into college

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First, rent a van. Get a big one, as big as you can afford and/or the school will allow you to bring. Get the maximum allowable van. It will beep when you pop it in reverse. Pop it in reverse often over the three days you have the van in your possession. Each time, look around in a panic trying to ascertain where that beeping is coming from, who is about to back up nearby. Amaze yourself with your inability to remember yourself. 

Walk through the dining room grumbling about all the boxes, all the paraphernalia, all of the extraneous supply. The helicopter keeps dropping off canisters to boost morale amidst the quagmire. Express skepticism on the practicality of all this stuff, much less the loading and unloading, and the fitting into the linoleumed dorm room. Get gently reminded at first that your opinion is not relevant in this situation, that you are on a need-to-know basis in terms of logistics and purchasing. Later you will be less gently reminded. Try to accept your figurehead status. 

Manifest indifference to the ever-growing hubbub, the percolating of anxiety, the friction of expectation. Walk around saying stuff like “people go to college every day” and “people have been leaving for school for a hundred years.” Wonder why no one in the family wants to hang out with you except the dog. (You’ve finally learned that the only thing the dog understands is tone of voice, so if you keep that in check the dog will hang indefinitely.)

The day before you leave, take off work to pack the van, and then grump around the house because the stuff that goes into the van is not yet ready to be packed. Everyone is supposed to help you pack the van, but everyone is scattered, running about, going to appointments. Feel resentful as you stare into the vacant rear of the van. Finally, after dinner go up to kid’s room and see that everything is lined up neatly for retrieval, see how the room looks irrevocably changed, looks like someone is moving out. Grab the bags silently. Make several trips unable to say anything to anyone, to think anything. Pack the van slowly in the dark after everyone has gone to bed while listening to Death Cab for Cutie on your airpods and feeling like this is it though not able to articulate to yourself what “it” is. 

Drive the van by yourself because everyone else is in smaller, more reasonable automobiles. Listen to your jazz music loudly until it annoys you into silence. Get a Chipotle burrito and eat it while driving to save time and regret it for the rest of the trip. You’re certainly going to have to pay some kind of cleaning fee now. Resolve, not for the first time, to stop eating burritos. 

See the Buc-ee’s. Pass by the Buc-ee’s because you are trying to make good time. 

Pull into town. Remember your own innate fondness for college towns. Subsume yourself with nostalgia for your own youth. Itemize the body parts you’d chop off, the small crimes you would commit, to experience that college time again, that pre-time, those Before Times, before you became what you are now, two parts [redacted], one part [redacted], three parts [redacted]. Before you became a parody of the dad figure in a sitcom rerun. Before you became the less funny version of that. 

Find the dorm and try for once not to panic about parking. 

Resolve for once in your life not to complain. Resolve to be a source of warmth and light for at least this one day. Resolve not to raise your doubting questions, your parental skepticism, your dad sarcasm, your husband cynicism. Resolve briefly to be the person all those people out there wish you to be. Resolve not to gripe even when after unloading the vanload of crap you go to the trendy mexican place where every other recently moved in freshman is eating, so that you stand in line for an hour, in your sweat-dried moving-in clothes, gut gnawing, a situation about which you would have normally pulled a full Yosemite Sam. 

Emphatically hold the door for other dads and moms. Like start holding the door open when you see them pulling into the parking lot. Practice a kind of yuppie solidarity. Resist the urge to compare and contrast the cartloads of crap that the other parents are pushing into the dorm. 

When it starts to rain while you’re unloading, say incongruent statements to fellow dads, like “Feels like I’m being peed on by frat boys!” and “This is like something out of a Cheever story!” and “Did you ever grow up with one of those little train sprinklers?” 

Almost pick a fight with the bearded RA who won’t get out of the way while you’re pushing a cartoload down the hall. He just stands there explaining something unimportant, like the mail room. Almost say, “Hey chief, how about you move your fat sophomore ass out of the line of traffic?” because you are sweaty, and he is annoying, and you are inexplicably gunning for a fight, searching for someone to hate, someone to unload all your angst upon. 

Say aloud, “This dorm is co-ed? Since when?” 

Practice your emotional detachment skills when nothing quite fits the way it was intended. Do this by drifting into a semi-nap, while leaning on a desk in the still-vacant room next door. 

Realize that every sentence you’ve said to your kid about college has really been a mistranslation of “I want to go back to college so bad I could spit.” Belatedly realize this was perhaps not the best foundation for life advice. 

Find the distant lot where you’re supposed to park the van after unloading. See that it’s across the street from a field of corn, incongruously. Say aloud to the van, “Well, we’re not in Kansas anymore.” Do a 37-point turn, with beeping, trying to fit the van in between a Yukon and an Audi. Try to forget that you clipped the side mirror of a Ford F-150 earlier with the van’s own Dumbo-eared side mirrors. Turn the van off and then have yourself a little come-apart. Practice your breathing and resolve to get in better shape once you get home, realizing that you’ve got a lot more hills to climb, parentally speaking, and that you’ve kind of let yourself go here lately. Try to make it back to the dorm on foot without calling to ask how to get back to the dorm. 

Realize that taking kid to college is not unlike taking them to swimming lessons. Realize that everything you’ve done as a parent has been like swimming lessons: too loud, a real pain in the ass in terms of logistics, too expensive, run with startlingly less expertise than you’d imagined, annoying somehow both to parent and child, but provided to save the child’s life in case they happen to find themselves located in water, either accidentally or intentionally.  

Swing by the dorm one last time to hug your kid and say goodbye. Rehearse in your head all of the pithy wisdom you’ve accumulated in your life so far. Outside the dorm, lose all of those sentences and be left with statements like, “gosh, it’s hot” and “so did you get registered for all your classes?” and “think that de-humidifier will be sufficient?” Coagulate all your father-strength, like a hero at the end of a Marvel movie, in order not to have a come-apart on the front steps of the dorm, while other families are unloading their vans of supplies, and your kid is itching to get back upstairs and get this life phase started. Realize that nothing you say in this moment will supplant the years of actual lived parenthood that the kid has experienced, and realize that you can’t remember the quality of that parenthood experience and hope that it wasn’t too damaging all told. Reflect that it’s probably for the best you don’t have perfect recall of every moment and interaction. Resolve, not for the first time, to be a better version of yourself. Resolve, not for the first time, to get by the gym every once in a while. Try not to crush kid with power of your hugging. 

Get lost driving out of campus the back way. Marvel at the resources and divisions of the modern R1 state university. “Swine lab?” Stop at the Buc-ee’s. Fill your van tank at one of the endless gas pumps. Relieve yourself at one of the endless urinals. Walk around and marvel at all the stuff you could buy to make yourself feel better. Marvel at the arrangement of twisted freaks that occupy a Buc-ee’s at any one moment in time, like Wal-Mart and Disney had a lost weekend together. Take a picture of the Beaver Nuggets display to send to your kid later. Then, on second thought, buy a pack of Beaver Nuggets as a potential snack option for the drive back, because who are you kidding? You are not above Beaver Nuggets. 

Place of Safety

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I try to avoid the discourse. Writing online has for the most part turned into a game of takes, and the stakes of the takes are always rising. Who can write the fastest on the scandal floating through the air that day? Before the Covid-19 pandemic, we were already living through a takes pandemic. They go viral, after all. 

But here I am anyway, conscripted briefly into the culture war. At least I’m not writing about that kidney-donation-short-story-litigation disaster. 

I was talking with a friend about what books could still be assigned to students and whether certain books, though historically significant, were now so far out of intellectual fashion that they should be replaced by better, different, more appropriate books. We were talking high school, that is, students who are still deemed children. But then, concurrently, out popped articles about Bright Sheng, the Leonard Bernstein Distinguished University Professor of Composition at the University of Michigan, who was teaching a music composition course on opera in which he showed the Laurence Olivier version of Othello in which Olivier portrays the hero in blackface. His students were “shocked” and quickly expressed their dismay to the powers that be. As a result, Sheng has stopped teaching the class and has written two public apologies. 

I don’t want to argue for or against Sheng’s showing of the film in his class. I don’t know anything about music composition, opera, various versions of or depictions of Othello, or the history and implications of blackface, aside from the obvious contemporary point that it’s connected to race relations in America and is thus absolutely radioactive in current polite society. What was Sheng’s pedagogical reason for showing the film? Should he have used a different depiction to better prove his point? Should he have provided a more thorough scholarly context for it? Should he have simply “known better”? I don’t know. I do think that a professor’s selection of course materials is a specific site of pedagogical dominion and an implicit articulation of importance, and that the course itself becomes an arena to debate the very inclusion of its own material. To use Shakespeare as a convenient example, any Shakespeare course, aside from its more top-level focus, is on a sedimentary level an argument that Shakespeare is worth studying and these works in particular are worth studying. Do you agree? Well, by the end of the course, if you’ve done the reading and participated in the class, you should have a fully developed opinion. But aside from that kind of 16-week long digestion, I don’t know if Sheng is right, wrong, careless, careful, or not. Perhaps I’m being too English major-y. I tend to take the teacher’s side in these matters under the assumption that the teacher chose the material on purpose, and it’s their class. I don’t question the tools my plumber uses when he’s working on the pipes at my house, because I don’t know anything about plumbing, and I want to be able to flush my toilet again, and as a result, I operate from a premise of respect toward the plumber.

What I am more interested in is a quotation from one of the students: 

“I was stunned,” [freshman Olivia] Cook said. “In such a school that preaches diversity and making sure that they understand the history of POC (people of color) in America, I was shocked that (Sheng) would show something like this in something that’s supposed to be a safe space.” 

Here I would like to stand on firmer argumentative ground: the college classroom is not a safe space, nor should it be. I mean, it should be a safe space in the way that all societal spaces should be safe; you should be safe from assault, battery, etc. But that is not the sense in which the student uses the term. The college classroom should not be a safe space for the students’ feelings. 

An important premise: the college students are purportedly adults and present of their own volition. But after that caveat, did seeing this movie hurt the students’ feelings? Impinge on their sense of propriety? Jump the tracks of a contemporary political taboo? Offend their decency? It doesn’t matter, because their feelings are not to be spared in the college classroom.* Why are they attending college? To learn an academic discipline? To obtain the credentials to get a job and secure a middle-class adulthood? To be immersed in the best of what has been thought and said? Whatever their reason, anytime that students learn about a discipline, they will be necessarily exposed to the history of that discipline, and by virtue of it hailing from the foreign country of the past, it will not comport with their current view of the discipline or society as a whole. Of course the students were shocked. They should be shocked. The film was released 56 years ago — three of their lifetimes. It’s so far out of current performance fashion that it now seems odious to the wide majority of society, and yet covering your eyes and insisting that the professor not show that movie does not make it go away. The bogeyman of the past is still out there killing innocents. Ignoring past cultural artifacts that are now deemed offensive doesn’t make them go away and doesn’t obviate why they were deemed important in the first place. Ignoring Olivier in blackface might make you feel more comfortable in the present moment but it does nothing to address current racism or to understand past racism. All it does is prolong one’s own ignorance of what actually happened. “Don’t tell me things I don’t want to hear” is no way to learn. It’s difficult to learn anything without having your feelings hurt, because learning is a form of conflict. And you only win that game if you do the reading. 

When I lived in Alabama and tornados were a routine part of existence, the weatherman would come on the screen and say, “It’s time to go to your place of safety.” This was a handy new euphemism for basement. It sounds poetic and cozy but it also makes sense. And for tornados, it’s accurate. When the storms are descending on your street, you can better protect yourself by getting to that un-windowed hallway. But intellectually, there is no place of safety from the ravages of the past. Of all the lessons an 18-year-old composition student might learn, this one could be the most valuable. 

*Their feelings are important, but they are less important within the context of the classroom.