Up, up, and away...

Emily, packed for college.

The access road between Emily's dorm and the dorm next door.

Not Emily's dorm.

Some poor (grand)parents beginning the long slog to the dorm that is not Emily's.

And a freshman, who also brought a television and a refrigerator.

Our team, who had to climb four flights.

Last load.

I had to drive to the bottom of another hill to park, and wait for a shuttle.

I stopped to take a picture of a field of solar panels by the athletic field.

I was dropped off to climb the hill to Emily's dorm.

I must find out about this. A residence unit, and a dog in charge.

The team at work.

The view from Emily's room. Her room is at the end of the hall, not off the corridor, and a tad larger than the hall rooms.

I walked from that intersection to the dorm, then up four flights of sixteen stairs each. Fortunately, I could rest often when I stood aside for loads of belongings coming up the steps.

Close to done.

The room mate arrives.

And it just kept coming.

While we still could shuffle out,

Hugs, and we left.

Summer officially is done. Tomorrow I will call Ruth and we will go to lunch!

We have met the colleges

Heidelberg, Founder's Hall through an Admissions Office window.

Heidelberg, a long shot across campus.

Heidelberg, another college building.

Heidelberg, outside the admissions building, with the bonus tee shirt.

Hiram, from the Admissions Office porch.

Hiram, Teachout Price building, a new addition nicely annexed to the old building.

 Hiram, Bowler Hall.

The bonus tee. We neglected to take the picture on campus.

 Hiram has more to say on the back.

I got a tee shirt, too.

Emily will apply to both,

but I believe she's already decided.

Choosing

Emily narrowed her college choices to Ohio Northern, Wooster, Heidelberg and Hiram, all in Ohio. All offer the degree she wants, and were recommended by her programming teacher. We have a window of opportunity in August to visit, and I began looking at how to get to the first three. Hiram I know.

Looking at the maps, I saw I could easily narrow my choices, too. Emily was booking a tour reservation with Heidelberg while I continued searching for Ohio Northern, in Ada. I called her to come look. Route 30 runs straight through Ohio, about a quarter of the way down. Demographically, it separates the blues and the reds. Ada is south of Route 30.

A liberal arts college is not necessarily liberal. If ON leaned right, it could be an uphill slog for a young woman with liberal views. I zoomed in on the town and the college. The latter is bigger than the town, several square miles in size, looking like a separate county, filled with parking lots, probably surrounded by cornfields. And a football stadium and sports complex consuming one third the campus. She fell in with my prejudices, and Ohio Northern may never be visited, except possibly for a visual illustration of my prejudice.

While she went back to fix a visit to Hiram, I looked up the College of Wooster. I’ve lived in Ohio all my life, have visited every part of the state many times, and must admit I’ve always had a slight prejudice against Wooster. Not because Route 30 slices neatly through the bottom of the city, leaving the college on the north side. No, I questioned the mindset of the town after they hired a dynamo friend to integrate the IT systems of all the schools, and after she had them humming like a top they “downsized” her in favor of a person half her age and half her salary.

To be fair, though, I looked at the city website. The first thing I saw scrolling through the side bar: Weekly Community Prayer Services. Finding Emily’s grandma too liberal to be pleased with that, in spite of a lovely little campus in the heart of the city, we sent it down to right above Ohio Northern. We may never visit.

Heidelberg and Hiram both are in charming old Connecticut Western Reserve towns. I know several Heidelberg graduates who think Emily would fit right in there, and one Hiram drop out who dropped out of even the University of California at LA. She won’t care where Emily goes. We’re off to Heidelberg as soon as Emily comes back from band camp, and the Hiram date will be settled on Monday.

I hope Emily takes a great liking to one or both of them, and then we can begin the funding process. And, dear universe, please keep us north of route 30.

Heidelberg

 Hiram

Bird Bed and Breakfast

We rearranged the lives of our flying pigs this morning

Now there are three feeders in the oak tree

and the two wren houses.

Left to right, the brown wren cabin,

the squirrel foiling feeder, 

a lovely buffet of nuts and fruits,

the white cabin wren house,

and the finch log o'niger seed.

The feeders are hanging from long hooks (yea, Hamilton!)

and low enough for Emily and Laura to reach down to fill.

A week's careful consideration and I decided

better in the oak tree, and all that flung seed sprouting 

in the lawn than in our lovely flower beds!

A finch, wishing I would leave.

Never mind her, fellows, let's eat.

A tufted titmouse.

Another finch.

Another titmouse.

The pictures are not first rate, but my pleasure in seeing these little fellows around is.

Next time I may have the tripod!

I am not over my recent computer debacle snit 

But it is the weekend.

And I may take off next week, after I file the tax budget with the county.

An A for a B

Yesterday’s story of a grade was not typical.  Here’s an offsetting story of my journey to a BS in Accounting.

I have always been fortunate.  Things work out for the best, on the whole.  I have one great example to prove this.

I went back to school for an accounting degree and added a new dimension to a complicated life.  In many ways life seemed roaring at me and I was going against the current.  My brother died one fall, my father the next winter.  I was in a new job, I needed to succeed, and I needed to add that BS in Accounting to my credentials.  I crammed all the courses into a very short time, two summers and one regular year of night classes, as I recall.

The absolute most hands down difficult course I took was Business Math.  It outdid even Statistics.  It was six weeks of Saturdays, eight a.m. to noon, in an elementary school, seated at a desk where my knees touched the underside of the writing surface.  The men in the class just sat on top of the desks and balanced their notebooks on their knees.

The first class covered resolving business models using algebra.  And I needed this to graduate?!  What was I going to do?  I last used algebra in the ninth grade. When the teacher galloped past proportions, which I still remembered, at about nine a.m., I knew I was a goner.  I kept turning the pages and taking notes, but I knew I would be found out the next Saturday when class would begin with an exam of the material covered the previous Saturday.

I went home that first Saturday and immediately called my best friend, Carol.  I needed to see Frank, the engineer.  Perhaps there was hope.  Nothing in that book frightened Frank.  For five Saturday afternoons he patiently explained what I was doing and how to solve the problems.  We’re talking matrices here, long before anyone made a movie.  I literally did a core dump for the exam each Saturday morning and moved on to the next phase of Business Math.  Calculus.  No problem.  A little trig.  Frank would explain it later.

The final Saturday morning would be the final exam.  In spite of Frank’s assurances I doubted I could reproduce the results of the previous Saturday mornings when I had only transferred a week’s worth of memorizing to a test paper.  I knew come that last Saturday I could hit all the wrong notes and expose myself for the math fraud I actually felt like.

Friday afternoon at work my phone rang.  It was my mom, who had my kids for the summer.  Shelly had jumped off the neighbor’s roof and broke her arm.  She was in the hospital; the compound fracture could not be set until Saturday, under general anesthesia.  Sometime that evening, going down to see Shelly and then resolving all the hospital details I remembered my exam the next morning. 

I cannot even remember how I tracked down that Business Math teacher in another county, after business hours, but I did.  I got him on the phone, explained I would be at the hospital at the scheduled exam time, and could we possibly find a time for me to have a make-up exam.

There was a very long pause.  Then he said if I were willing to trade my A for a B, he would waive the final exam.  And that’s how I passed Business Math.

Grade inflation

Many years ago I went back to school to become an accountant and earn more money. I needed to feed two children, keep them housed and clothed.  Mastering a profession seemed sensible, so I went back to the halls of ivy.  Actually, a beautiful little undergraduate college, Lake Erie College in Painesville. 

This was in the late seventies, I was in my mid thirties and an anomaly.   I convinced the administration to give me a degree based only on taking core courses.  I already had undergraduate and graduate degrees in English and didn’t have time to sit their requirements too! Toward June, after I had completed the accounting requirements I received a cap and gown order form in the mail.  I wrote back to mail me the degree and the dean was so surprised he called me.  I explained I’d been through the ceremony before and couldn’t see taking a day off work.  “Oh,” he said, and mailed it.

I took evening classes, summer classes, weekend classes, and this yielded an interesting assortment of teachers.  Summer professors especially might be from other schools, taking on a part time assignment. I remember a macro economics prof as if it were yesterday.

Very short, very stocky, from Boston.  He looked like a fisherman.  He dressed like a fisherman.  Dark khaki pants, a motley blue fisherman style pullover sweater, a rib knit stocking cap he never took off, heavy boots.  In my mind’s eye I associate a red bandana with him, too; pocket or neck, I don’t remember.  There were no “r’s” in his words and he compensated with attitude.  Instead of the usual desk chair at the front of the room he sat on a high stool beside the desk and lectured.

His was a six week summer course and he immediately assigned an essay to be completed and turned in at the end as our final grade.  He gave some general requirements; I knew exactly what I would write about and started my research.  The year was 1977, the country was suffering a gasoline crisis due to the Arab oil embargo.    Conserving and recycling already were hot subjects and I thought it was time to put one of my pet ideas on paper.

The idea was people should be able to ride bicycles safely, to work, to shop, for recreation.  I wanted bicycle roads built using abandoned rail ways, and extended into city centers.  I located rail lines that could be used. I calculated oil savings that would put OPEC right out of business, in addition to making us a healthy nation.  It was a very good paper and I was quite proud of it.

The dour little professor returned our papers the last night of class.  Mine was on top and had a very large C+ scrawled across the front page in red ink.  He held it high for all the room to see.  He went on, “Grade inflation is epidemic in American colleges and universities.  I am taking a stand against it.  In any college, including Boston University, where I teach, this paper would be graded A+.  Twenty years ago this paper would have received a C for average.  I am very generous in giving it a C+.” 

He walked about putting papers on desks.  Each subsequent grade was lower than mine.  The bastard.

Where I cribbed the cartoon

A psychology class

When I started college, I went year round, and graduated in three years.  I fitted a number of “core requirements” into summers, to get them over in six weeks.  Buildings were not air conditioned way back then, and in retrospect I believe every summer course I took was held in the hot, hot garret of an old, old building.  These abbreviated classes generally were two to three hours in duration, depending on the credit hours.

A psychology class I took one summer was held in an amphitheater style class room on top of the chemistry building.  The room was hot, stuffy, somewhat malodorous; the sun glinted on brass railings from windows high under the eaves, the professor droned, a tiny figure telescoped down there on the stage, writing his points on the board, occasionally turning to face us.

Every student in the class showed up the day of the anticipated mid-term examination, and learned the exam would be the following day, as the professor had another topic to cover.  He ignored the collective groan and ploughed on.  As he droned and pens scratched, subdued whispering and some rustling commenced in the upper rows.  A young man was using the opportunity of the prof’s turned back to descend a few rows, ducking adroitly into an end seat or behind the back of a seat when the professor turned toward us.  We knew he was heading for the fire escape door, open wide for any hint of breeze.  We all were rooting for his perfect escape, repressing the urge to cheer, or even breathe loudly.

The professor caught the mood, and the rustling and surveyed the class between writing bouts. It became a cat and mouse game.  The professor wrote, then whipped around.  Nothing.  He asked “Is something the matter?”  Nervous titters.  The next time around he checked his fly.  The class still hung on, with difficulty.  The escapee was a few rows from his goal, which included a few feet across the edge of the stage occupied by the professor. Dead silence except for chalk and the voice talking to the blackboard.  The student went through the door and down the stairs.  The room burst into laughter and applause.

This time the professor tugged his zipper to be sure it was firmly in place before demanding “What is so funny!?”  We didn’t tell him. Social Psychology in action.