little facts

I know I bitch about certain students a lot on here, but most of my students are decent people. And a lot of them are pretty likeable and interesting.

Like for example: on my most recent non-majors class exam, I asked them to give an example of a heterotroph. One of the students wrote "Me!" Hahahahaha. And yes, he's correct.

Yesterday morning, in my 8 am class, a couple of the women who had got there early were debating when I walked in - was today (the 10th) Veterans' Day, or was it Saturday.

I said, "It's the 11th of November. It's always the 11th of November. Some banks may be taking today off but Saturday is the real holiday. It's the commemoration of the day that the Armistice was signed that ended World War I."

And one of the students looked at me, and sort of smiled, and said, "Hey, I didn't know that!"

"Yeah." I said, and then intoned, "The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was the end of World War I and in a lot of places the holiday is called Armistice Day."

Her response was basically "That's cool! I didn't know that!"

And that kind of thing makes me happy - understand, this was a statistics class, not a history class, so Veterans'/Armistice Day had nothing to do with the day's topic. But I like knowing those little facts, and I like it when I share the facts and somebody thinks it's interesting or that they've learned something they didn't know before.

I also feel like knowing those kind of things - and passing them on when I can - is my little way of honoring the past. You see - I had a great-uncle who was in the infantry in the Great War (as it used to be called). My mother has inherited a whole scrapbook of newspaper clippings, and his letters home, and all that, that HER grandmother (my great-uncle's mom) kept.

And on the other side of my family, my grandfather was in training at the end of WWI, although he never really saw action, as far as I know.

So I feel a little bit like I'm honoring the memory of those two men - one whom I never met, the other whom I only knew as an old man - by spreading the news about Armistice Day.

(And you know? It's so odd to think of it - only two generations removed from me, there were people who fought in WWI. When you look at the tiny amount of old grainy film taken of the time - both of the fighting men and of the stuff like Franz Ferdinand in a parade, that led up to it - it seems like another world totally. It seems almost as remote as the Civil War. And yet - I knew men - not just my grandpa - when I was growing up who fought in that war. And WWII, which seems to be fading from our collective consciousness - I had an uncle who was in the Navy. And lots of men from my church when I was growing up were WWII veterans.)

It makes me sad when I see people who seem a little unmoored from history. Conversely, it makes me happy when I meet up with people who know and care and who say things like "I had an uncle who fought in Korea and I know all the stories he told." or "My great-grandma was on the Orphan Train and she told stories about it when I was a little girl." I like the humanization of history - the fact that men and women that we are related to, or work with, or go to church with, or sit and talk at the coffee shop with, are all people who were in some way involved.

I also had a good class yesterday in my other class. The topic was epidemiology and since many of the students in there are health-sciences-oriented folks rather than conservation folk (many semesters it's mostly conservation folk), I spent some time looking up human examples rather than using the game-examples of brucellosis and rabies that the textbook presented. I had some stuff on Ebola, and what I had been able to glean (that wasn't hyped to death) on bird flu, and the most information I had was on the 1918 flu (WWI again!).

They were really pretty engaged. I saw more interest in that class than I've seen in a while. So that makes me happy. I always like the feeling when I "connect," when I've taught something that seems worthwhile to them. When it excites them or gets them curious and wanting to know more.

And you know? I think that's my frustration with some of my non-majors students. And while it's true I don't see them in their other classes and what they're doing - and I only see them a few hours a week - I almost get the feeling, from talking with some of them and from overhearing things they talk about before and after class, that a lot of them are kind of jaded and disengaged. It's like "I'm 20 and my life is ending and all that faces me now is 40 years of mind-grindingly boring work at a career, and aging, and finally death" and I want to kind of shake them and scream at them and tell them a couple of things:

a. Life gets better after you're 30. You're more confident, a lot of the crap you lay on yourself (or that people lay on you) when you're in your 20s goes away. People get a little more real.

b. If you look around, you can find a career that's fun and worthwhile and yet that pays enough to keep you well. True, you have to work for it when you're in college, and true, you may have a few years of dues-paying once you get on the job - but - pick something you enjoy!

c. Develop a passion! One of the things in a lot of the college "kids" that I see seems to be a lack of a passion for anything - it's like they kind of graze along the surface everywhere and nothing makes a very deep impression on them. The people who make me happy are the people who care really deeply about something and want to learn all they can about it. And I don't care what it is - epidemiology, or all of Frank Sinatra's work, or stagecraft, or regional dialects of Appalachia, or fashions of the 1960s, or Fermat's Last Theorem, or the Presidents of the U.S. or whatever! Care about something! Find something that, even if you DO wind up in a soul-crushingly boring job you can have something to think about and care about!

d. Regardless of what anyone tells you, college is not necessarily the best time of your life and you don't have to try to force it to be that way by going out and partying every night or going the whole Ecclesiastes route of trying and discarding different things and then concluding that "all is vanity." College CAN be a good time of your life - but I think the people who say, "Oh, high school is the best time of your life!" or "Enjoy your 20s because it all goes downhill from there!" do a real disservice to people in that age group. Because, you know? Lots of people are MISERABLE in high school - and so, if you tell them "this is the best time of their lives," what does that say to them? And - I hated my 20s. I was totally insecure, I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, I was always worrying about money. Things are much better now and it infuriates me when people imply that my life has peaked just because I have a few gray hairs and can't do cartwheels any more.

So anyway, to sum up:

enthusiasm: good
feeling like you gotta cram in all the partying and excitement now because once you hit 25 or so the world turns gray: not true
thinking that partying or shopping or video games or sports is all there is worthwhile in life: false.