In Which I Admit I Should Have Listened
While in high school I became enamored with the social sciences. I'm sure that was, in large part, due to my school's social science department, who were all these aging hippie types. One was teaching in Watts during the riots, another spent his summers living in a tent on another's property. A third was so scatterbrained we would never be able to read the overhead projector because it was pointing on the ceiling and sometimes he would stop talking mid-thought and just sit and ponder for a few minutes - it had to be from all the LSD he dropped in the 60's. They were also all incredibly intelligent. Even the younger ones fit into the culture of the department.
My friends and I, we were the educated rebels. Most of us didn't drink, we weren't rampantly screwing, we wouldn't break the rules, but would just push them to their breaking point. We explored impeaching our student body president (but gave up when we realized he would have a 2/3 vote in whether or not he was impeached), tried to get a dog elected to the homecoming court, and our most splendid accomplishment was when we ran Wil Wheaton for student body president. According to a friend on student council who helped count the votes he probably would have won had they been allowed to count those votes. (That stunt was a statement about the stupidity of the system that allowed outgoing seniors to have a vote on who would be student body president for the following year)
Is it any surprise that come graduation my goal was to be a high school social sciences teacher and debate coach?
Not to say there weren't other teachers who earned our love. Our pre-calculus teacher, Mr. McQueen, was the one who was bestowed with the April Fool's Day prank (in which we moved his ENTIRE classroom out onto the track).
Science teachers, in general, were outside of our radar. Might have something to do with the fact that the head Chemistry teacher at our school was more interested in jokes and analogies than actually teaching chemistry and our AP Biology teacher was a complete moron. (Here is a complete list of what I learned in AP Biology: Depeche Mode was playing a second concert in Portland and tickets were still available).
So when I got to my senior year Physics class with Ms. Clement, odds were strongly against her. As science classes went I enjoyed it. I was good at it. But I was a social sciences kind of girl.
One week I was going to be gone to a debate tournament during Physics, and we were having a lab in class that day. Because Ms. Clement's free period coincided with the period I was a TA (for a social science teacher, of course), it was arranged that she would do the lab privately for me so I wouldn't miss it. The 45 minute lab took about 15 minutes since I didn't have to ask lots of stupid questions along the way and have her repeat things multiple times. So she spent a good chunk of time after that trying to convince me that I should study Physics in college. Or if not Physics, one of the hard sciences.
But I would have nothing to do with that. I was a social scientist! History was my thing! No hard sciences for me!
Life moved on. My freshman year of college most of my friends were physics or engineering majors, and I realized that it wasn't such a bad path to take after all. And after my freshman year of college I was a social scientist no more. Had Ms. Clement informed me of the fact that hard scientists could get PAID to go to school I might have listened a little more closely to her.
Now, it's not that I regret my decisions in life, but I often wonder what if? And if I were forced to go back in life and change one decision I'd made, it would be that day with Ms. Clement, sitting at the lab table, I may have listened to what she had to say a little more closely and considered it a little more seriously. Because just because it isn't what you have in mind right now, doesn't mean it's not a very good thing indeed.
This story has a connection to modern day events, but I'm going to let you just chew on this for a bit and post the rest later.
My friends and I, we were the educated rebels. Most of us didn't drink, we weren't rampantly screwing, we wouldn't break the rules, but would just push them to their breaking point. We explored impeaching our student body president (but gave up when we realized he would have a 2/3 vote in whether or not he was impeached), tried to get a dog elected to the homecoming court, and our most splendid accomplishment was when we ran Wil Wheaton for student body president. According to a friend on student council who helped count the votes he probably would have won had they been allowed to count those votes. (That stunt was a statement about the stupidity of the system that allowed outgoing seniors to have a vote on who would be student body president for the following year)
Is it any surprise that come graduation my goal was to be a high school social sciences teacher and debate coach?
Not to say there weren't other teachers who earned our love. Our pre-calculus teacher, Mr. McQueen, was the one who was bestowed with the April Fool's Day prank (in which we moved his ENTIRE classroom out onto the track).
Science teachers, in general, were outside of our radar. Might have something to do with the fact that the head Chemistry teacher at our school was more interested in jokes and analogies than actually teaching chemistry and our AP Biology teacher was a complete moron. (Here is a complete list of what I learned in AP Biology: Depeche Mode was playing a second concert in Portland and tickets were still available).
So when I got to my senior year Physics class with Ms. Clement, odds were strongly against her. As science classes went I enjoyed it. I was good at it. But I was a social sciences kind of girl.
One week I was going to be gone to a debate tournament during Physics, and we were having a lab in class that day. Because Ms. Clement's free period coincided with the period I was a TA (for a social science teacher, of course), it was arranged that she would do the lab privately for me so I wouldn't miss it. The 45 minute lab took about 15 minutes since I didn't have to ask lots of stupid questions along the way and have her repeat things multiple times. So she spent a good chunk of time after that trying to convince me that I should study Physics in college. Or if not Physics, one of the hard sciences.
But I would have nothing to do with that. I was a social scientist! History was my thing! No hard sciences for me!
Life moved on. My freshman year of college most of my friends were physics or engineering majors, and I realized that it wasn't such a bad path to take after all. And after my freshman year of college I was a social scientist no more. Had Ms. Clement informed me of the fact that hard scientists could get PAID to go to school I might have listened a little more closely to her.
Now, it's not that I regret my decisions in life, but I often wonder what if? And if I were forced to go back in life and change one decision I'd made, it would be that day with Ms. Clement, sitting at the lab table, I may have listened to what she had to say a little more closely and considered it a little more seriously. Because just because it isn't what you have in mind right now, doesn't mean it's not a very good thing indeed.
This story has a connection to modern day events, but I'm going to let you just chew on this for a bit and post the rest later.
posted by Swankette at 9:18 AM
1 Comments:
I wish I listened to my parents more. However, the one time I listened to my dad (I wanted to go into sports reporting, he said no one would ever listen to a woman talk about football) I ended up probably giving up a very, very lucrative career (granted, as a sideline reporter, but still...).
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