Skip to main content

Fortieth College Reunion, In Absentia

My fortieth college reunion is this coming weekend; I am not attending.

I've struggled with mixed feelings about that huge part of my formative years spent at Yale. I went there as an undergraduate and stayed to get my doctorate in mathematics. The graduate schooling was more monomaniacal and easier for me to assimilate, but I turned 17 my first month as an undergraduate and the experiences were much harder to process.

I grew up middle-class; my time at Yale was the first time that I felt poor. I knew that I wasn't, intellectually, that I never went hungry involuntarily. Still, I was surrounded by a student culture that treated the large disposable income that I lacked as the norm.  After my first year I found a circle of friends who were like me, and from there I felt the presence of a support net socially.

This was the first time where I was challenged intellectually as the rule and not the exception. I had taken math classes at a local college while finishing high school, and they were some of the best I ever took. I had some inspiring classes in high school but they were not the standard in the way they were at Yale. A large part of who I am as an intellectual being still goes back to those four years I spent as an undergraduate.

Hard times lead to strong relationships; I have kept up with good friends from that time. My interest in returning for a reunion to spend time with other classmates who looked down on me, not so much. The faculty who inspired me, my dissertation advisor, the librarian who supervised my nine years of work study, they are long gone. Some of the old buildings (and truly gorgeous architecture, I mean, really gorgeous architecture) are there; new buildings have arisen. For me the place was always the people and the ones who made me who I am now are no longer there.

40 years; I've had a full life since then, married, had children, built a career.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Betrayal

I caught a student cheating on a final exam this morning. I had a line of sight on them and watched for ten minutes as they took their cellphone out of their pocket, kept it below their table, typed into it, read it, put it away, then wrote on the exam, repeating this cycle over and over again.  I was a bit surprised as the exam was open notes but this student had not attended many of our classes, just stopping by for exams, and I conjecture that they had no notes to open. I confronted the student who admitted that they had done wrong in an inarticulate non-confessional way. By the afternoon they had signed off on the honor code violation report to avoid further investigation and possible sanctions beyond failing the exam.  Is anger the right emotion to feel now? I had a working relationship with the student, although they had not contributed much to it. They had deceived me in order to gain unwarranted advantage over their peers in the class and that is not right. I don't wan...
1 comment
Read more

Holiday Break

I have been teaching for 37 years now, and I go through many of the same things at the end of the Fall semester each year. There is relief at the completion of a significant task (teaching each of my classes) but there is a good deal of physical and mental weariness and aches. I could sleep for several days straight if not for my sleep disorder. By and large my mind is not very sharp and as an introvert I try to be pleasant with loved ones but am not outgoing at all. With age the feeling of being drained deepens in more and more ways. Of course this is when we have, almost every year, taken a road trip to visit birth families in the Northeast, a full day of driving each way, often involving winter weather far worse than what we are accustomed to in NC. I love my birth family members as well but as with my created family I am weary and not very outgoing. The conversation is rarely about me and my day-to-day life but rather about younger family members and family friends that I do not kn...
Post a Comment
Read more

Collective

Something good happened this week; I was informed of it yesterday when a colleague forwarded an email to me announcing it.  The announcement had to do with our university administration committing resources to something that needed doing; the fact that it had not been done had threatened the safety and work environment of dozens of my colleagues. I was clueless about it until in my job as ombudsperson I heard about it from multiple individuals. 95% of my job as ombudsperson (roughly) is focused on the individuals who come to me, brainstorming about their options and weighing the advantages and disadvantages of each. I've been around my university for over 36 years so I've picked up some knowledge of our system and as a mathematician I have a lot of training and experience in problem-solving. I'm not bad at counseling stressed individuals; professional development at ombuds meetings has helped me a lot with that. 5% of my job as ombudsperson (roughly) is managing upward. The...
Post a Comment
Read more