College Days: Fall 98

Since I usually talk about my childhood a lot, let's instead focus on my adulthood.

I graduated from high school in 1998. The Caps had recently snuck into the Stanley Cup finals and... I'm not sure if anything else happened that year. Anyway, I'm going to go over my memories of that semester in what may prove to be an eleven part series.

My grades at high school weren't that great. I struggled in my freshman year, and unless the councelors were just trying to scare me, that may have cost me in the long run. After I survived my freshman year I adjusted and cruised through the last three years. I grew up thinking that I would get a job after leaving high school, but I was surprised during my junior year when my parents told me to apply for the University of Maryland. I did, even if I stupidly waited to the last minute to do so.

The essay I had to write was about my favorite book and how I would take lessons from it, or something. I picked Dante's The Inferno because I didn't read any novels outside of class and it was the only one that I really liked. I'm sure it seemed like a great idea at the time. For recommendations, I got one from my math teacher, which was important because math was my strong poin and I was planning a major involving computers or accounting. The other recommendation I got was from my Catholic Ethics teacher because I was getting an A in the class. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Now I wonder about that.

I did eventually learn that I was accepted into the University of Maryland. However, I was pissed to learn that I was waitlisted for a semester. I had to go to Montgomery Community College in the meantime. For a long time "waitlisted" was a dirty word in my mind. I went to Montgomery Community College Takoma Park campus because it was closer then Prince George's CC.

I took the placement test during the summer when I was still seventeen. I remember that because they asked if there were still any underaged people. I had to call my mom just to learn my social security number for the test. I think it was just a math test.

When the semester finally started, I took four classes, which my parents helped me pick. I took Pre-Calculus, even though I took it in my junior year in high school. I wonder if I didn't do so well on the placement test. I took chemistry with a lab class. I took an English 101 class. And I took what we thought was a computer class. It was, but not quite what we expected.

My schedule was perfect in my mind, except for the lab class on Tuesdays. I would have my earliest classes in the morning and be out sometime at three on most days. My Fridays were light and I went home before noon, and that set the standard when I picked my classes for the rest of my time in college. I always tried to have light Fridays (and Mondays.)

One of the advantages of this particular campus was that it was only a 15 minute walk away from the Metro Station. I don't drive so I needed this. If I remember correctly, it usually took about thirty minutes on the metro to get to the College Park Metro Station, the closest to my home. That semester I usually walked home, and that usually took fourty-five minutes. Only rarely did I take a bus home, which would cut time down to 6 minutes. The problem was that the bus only showed up every hour, so I avoided for most of that semester.

Montgomery Community College isn't that big. On my first tour there, I saw a lounge with a couple couches and a tv screen. This is where I usually went to hang out, because there wasn't too many other places to go. Most of the time I spent my free periods there watching ESPN or doing homework. I wasn't the only one who used the tv, and most people would change the channel for BET and other music video channels. I heard several music videos, including "Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)", which I thought was one of the dumbest songs I ever heard. I don't recall if there was a cafeteria, and if there was, I probably didn't go. This may have been the poin in my life where I never ate anything until late afternoon. There was a computer lab, but I only went there a couple times for my computer class. The internet was still rather young at the time.

Pre-Cal was the first class I went to. It started out in a room that reminded me a lot high school but we eventually moved to a computer lab. The professor taught the class five times a week, and it wasn't broken up into lecture and discussion. Since I took Pre-Cal two years before, I easily got the highest grades in the class. There's honestly not much more to say about this class.

My chemistry class had to lectures on Tuesday/Thursday and a lab from 1-4p on Tuesdays. I have to say that I like chemistry more then most other sciences that I've taken, including advanced biology and physics. The lectures were taught by one professor for most of the semester, but something happened that forced her to stop teaching the lab classes, so another woman took over that. This class may have been my intro to the college way of teaching classes, i.e. lots of text book reading. I was warned about this in high school and was determined to keep up. I don't recall how well I did (the professor posted all her notes on an overhead projector so we probably didn't have to do all the reading) but I'm sure I did a better job keeping up in that class then my English class.

I remember the lab far more then the lecture class. We were all assigned to tables with four other people. Sometimes we would work together, often times not. Most labs would involve heating something so I got to gingerly hold the spark lighter near the bunsen burner and pray I wouldn't burn myself. And I was pretty bad with the lighter, so it took me a long time to light that thing. We had a secondary book with the activities to do each week. Sadly, I was horrible at reading it, because I was always asking the professor about some of the blanks we had to fill in. I'm sure it annoyed her as time went on. I can't remember too many specific labs, except for the one where we just sat down and built molecules with sticks and balls. Otherwise all I remember is the time I dropped the lid of a cup I was burning. I caught it, which was a bad idea. So I dropped it again. I remember raising my hand when the professor asked who dropped what.

My computer class was really a rehash of a class I took in highschool. It taught us how to use things like Windows Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and other Microsoft Office tools. Despite the fact that I was signed up for the class thinking it would
help in a career towards computers, I later learned that it was counted as some Business class in the UMD. It was a Monday/Wednesday class. I remember the professor or teacher wanted us to get floppy disks for the class, which is funny to think about now. She just wanted us to save our files in these disks. At one poin she wanted us to write an essay about my life, and I kept it boring. I wonder if I should read that essay a decade after it was written just to compare my life then to now and see how I would react.

The class was very easy. I didn't bother studying for the first exam, and that set up one of the scarier moments I had at Montgomery CC. A girl that sat next to me asked me if I studied for the test. I wasn't sure if the test was that day or the next class, so I thought she might have been talking to somebody else behind me. I was walking towards her while I was about to make my turn to go up the stairs to the class. I made the mistake of just looking at her briefly and saying nothing. Big mistake. She let loose on me while I was still walking to class and I realized my mistake. Even worse, she started accusing me of racism because she was black. At this poin I decided to just quickly go to the hallway outside the class. She gave me a dirty look before we went into the class, yet she quickly forgave me when I told her that I didn't know the test was that day. She even offered her notes before the test. I felt terrible for the rest of the day. When I was at the metro station and I missed a train, I made a woman repeat what she mumbled to herself because I didn't want to get accused of anything again.

That brings us to the last class I had, English 101. I believe this was a Tuesday/Thursday class. I was never good at verbal skills, but I wasn't prepared for what this class threw at me. The professor was an old man who hated life and himself. At the beginning of the semester some professor offered to bring some students over to her class. I really wish I had done that, because I may have had a better chance. The professor I got did all his time complaining about how we were all morons who were going to end up working at McDonald's. We had a textbook with a lot of essays but I'm not sure why. We would have discussions about the essays but it didn't count for anything.

At Montgomery CC, they had a stupid system where essays were graded by two independant graders who grade on a 1-4 poin system. 1 was an F, 2 was a D, 3 was a C , and 4 was an B or A. If the two graders gave different scores, then a third grader was the tie breaker. This stupid system was bias towards failing. Our essays had to be written in class during the hour or so the class lasted. We were usually given three different essay topics. Towards the end of the semester there was one big essay that we would have to pass or we would automatically fail the class. All the other essays were practice for this one. Those who failed it had to take a remake on a Saturday or something, and those who failed that had the option for an audit. I'm pretty damn sure I passed that big essay, but I failed the class, so I'm not sure what was going on here.

The professor himself was a bastard. His big advice to pass the essays? Buy a newspaper everyday and read the op-ed page. That was it. The op-ed page was suppose to magically teach us about all kinds of stuff like big words. I tried this but I wasn't impressed by this method. (Also, this was 1998, when the Clinton scandal was exploding. So the op-ed articles in the Washington Post had a sameness to them.) Otherwise there was not much to the class. We had some discussions about the textbook essays we had to read, but I don't know why we bothered. The rest of the time he complained about how life sucked. He told us how hard it was to get good jobs (admittedly true) and he told us how the government was going to kill us if we didn't pay attention to it (maybe not in those words.) He took great pleasure over the Clinton scandal (not that he was a Republican fan) and I remember him laughing during the day Clinton gave his infamous "definition of is" testimony. He would complain about how much the English department sucked. He would also complain about how Christianity sucked.

We had one good discussion over a hypothetical situation where a wife had to support her husband after he decided to quit his job to become a writer. And we went over one essay written by Maya Angelou. He told us about how she was a liar because her essay made it look like blacks went to colleges to specifically get bad jobs ("janitor 101") when that wasn't the case.

There was one essay written by the author of Lord of the Flies. It was about the three levels of smartness or thinking. The lowest level was about doing what everybody else did, and the upper levels had to do with thinking on your own and being inventive. I remember thinking what an arrogant bastard the author was. He's suppose to be as smart as level three Einstein (who he once met). Why? Because one time he out-argued a dumb level one Christian (BLECK!) girl. He hated marriage because that was just some dumb level one thinking and the world needed some innovative level three thinking! Whatever. Our last day of class ended early because he made us read Martin Luther King Jr's essay that he wrote while he was in jail. We were suppose to notice something about the essay but nobody did, so the professor laughed at us and dismissed us.

That was my first semester of college. In the end, I only had two classes that counted for anything, and one was a class I already took in high school. I went to the University of Maryland the next semester after this test run. Good bye, Hawks.