The Struggle

It's 2:45 AM, and I can't sleep. Unfortunately I'm very poor at regulating my sleeping pattern. There's always something that keeps me up late and then I end up sleeping in late, which throws the whole schedule off the next day. It's a vicious cycle.

Every Martin Luther King, Jr. Day there's some depressing story plastered across the washingtonpost.com website, which serves as my home page. This year it indicated that something like 15% of college students think that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech is about abolishing slavery. Maybe 15% isn't a very large number of students, but should we have anyone going into college without knowing what that speech is about? If they've managed to live 18+ years of their lives without that fairly simple piece of knowledge then it makes me wonder what else they don't know.

At any one given time at my university there are probably more remedial writing and mathematics classes than the entry-level writing and mathematics classes themselves. It's just mind-boggling to me how people have gone through at least 12 years of education without gaining fundamental writing and mathematics skills. And I do mean fundamental - it doesn't take a Faulkner to get into Composition I or an Archimedes to get into College Mathematics. What's more there are three levels of remedial classes and apparently people have had to take all three of them before being able to take the actual class itself. The obvious exception to these sorts of things is people with a learning disability, but there aren't enough people with a learning disability to account for all of these remedial classes.

Speaking of university, it's amazing how much we have to spend on textbooks. I've spent at least $250, which is cheap because some of the books I already had because my university's professors are too lazy to use updated material and stay on the cutting edge, preferring instead to use the same transparencies (not even PowerPoint) for at least a decade before realizing that information changes. I understand that some Virginia congressman is trying to create something like a digital database of textbooks, which I suppose is a good idea. What would be better would be policy makers finally recognizing the value of college education and putting enough money into helping students get there, giving them a proper foundation before they get there and insuring that there are high standards for the quality of education at the institutions themselves. I know a few tenured professors who need the boot!

I have honestly struggled to go back to school this week. I don't know if it's because sometimes it seems like an exercise in futility or I'm afraid to go back after taking the Africa break or just downright disillusionment or something else along those lines. Mitra's advice was to take the bit between my teeth and show them who I am, which really seems to be the best way of going about things if only I could find that necessary "oomph" to get going. I keep trying to remind myself of all the African friends I made who wanted so desperately to attend university, but there's just some sort of intense malaise that's settled over me that prevents me from getting fired up about anything.