Random compiled thoughts on college and education
I suppose you may notice a slight increase in "random" posts. Part of it is that since I haven't written in so long there are many things that can't be easily categorized that I want to talk about. The other part is that in case I go off topic or on a tangent it's alright since it wasn't really supposed to be structured anyway.
So today I'm going to talk about college. Yeah, it's sort of strange going into this at the beginning of my junior year rather than freshmen year - my standard excuse for this sort of thing is that I'm lazy, which while being true doesn't really encompass everything. To be honest, there were aspects of college that I did not find all that different from high school (of course, there are many aspects that are completely different which I really didn't thin about) and thus it was harder to take notice of them without putting some serious thought into it.
First off, some background. I was born in the United States and lived there until I was 11, going to private schools for the most part, living a fairly typical moderately well-off Asian-American life as far as education goes (if a bit more WASP-y than some) until I moved to Taiwan after the summer of 5th grade. From there my path started to become a bit more unique. Of course, everyone's path to unique - even siblings who grow up in the same home and go to the same school cannot be exactly the same, but this would make the differences shaping me into the man I am today even more pronounced than they would probably be otherwise.
I was homeschooled for 3 years, starting from 6th grade and ending 8th grade - when I tell people this, many assume that it's because I'm a Christian (though most wouldn't know that I wasn't one all my life) and my parents felt that public education is too secular or something along those lines. It's not an altogether unreasonable assumption, though it amuses me to no end because of how un-conservative I am. Nope, basically it was because the level of my Chinese language ability was... well, let's just say inadequate. I could carry on a conversation in Mandarin and function in Taiwan, but I couldn't read and write. To be honest, I can't really remember how I became proficient - it seems all of a sudden after several years I opened a newspaper and found out I could actually read. There are some more memorable methods that I remember - guess and check with my parents when we were on the street, which involved my brother and I trying to figure out what some signs said, oftentimes making unintentional but hilarious mistakes. My parents also introduced manga to me - Japanese-style comic books, albeit translated into Chinese. It was the first time I had ever encountered anything like that, and I was absolutely hooked. The series that I recall learning the most from was "Slam Dunk" by Takehiko Inoue, one about a newcomer to basketball learning the ropes because the girl he had a crush on absolutely loved basketball or something like that. I made noob mistakes when reading like mistaking 帥 for 師 - the former meaning "handsome" and the latter meaning "teacher/master", and 耍 for 要 - the former meaning something along the lines of "showboating" and the latter meaning "wanting".
Then I went to an experimental high school in the mountains (roughly 500 meters, so not all that high actually but enough so that the weather was nice and cool) and there my Chinese *really* improved. When you're tossed into an environment when you're forced to do something and you have a reasonable foundation for it you can really mature and grow.
... where was I?
Oh right, why I didn't really have any profound thoughts on college until now. (Actually I'm highly doubtful about the profound nature of all this) So my school was experimental in that it returned the initiative to learn back to the students, something that most Taiwanese schools don't do at all. What does this mean? For a while I had a hard time describing what exactly was "alternative" about my high school's style of education. We could choose our own classes, though there were certain "core" ones we had to complete for graduation, we lived in dorms away from home and ate in a cafeteria, there were many liberal arts classes that would be considered "extra-curricular" in most schools... how can I describe all that? Then my Dad said, "Basically, it's like college."
Dang, that basically summed it up right there. The teachers certainly minded and were concerned if you didn't go to class and what not but they wouldn't beat your ass over it; you could take just 12 credits a semester and the only person you were cheating was yourself, if you wanted to plan an event the initiative was on you and interested parties to apply for funding and what not...
Thus explains why in a sense coming to the University of Michigan wasn't *that* big of a transition. I'd say in a typical (I use this term loosely) education there is quite a separation between high school and college - the single most significant one is the disappearance of a barrier between school life and "home" life during the semester, for most students. (Obviously if you commute this does not apply to you quite as much) In a typical high school the average day when school's in is divided into two or three portions, depending on how you categorize things - school, extra-curricular, and home. For simplicity's sake only two are important for now - school, and home. Both are generally completely different environments. They have different cultures, figures of authority, time orientation, food ^_^; etc.
Typically, you go to school in the morning and return home in the afternoon, helping to create a clean divide between the two with very little overlap. In middle school for me, the schedule went class class class lunch class class class go home. At home there are things to do, like dishes or chores or practicing violin and what not, but it's not a schedule per se; for the most part you just do them and the rest of your time is for your discretionary use.
What's also interesting (but probably altogether not uncommon) is that you can be one person at school and another at home. You don't have lunch in the cafeteria the same way you have it at home, you don't insult your classmates the same way you would your brother (shock!), you tell different jokes at home since your parents probably don't have the same sense of humor that your classmates do, and if you were raised in a minority home like I was then there's also the chance that you spoke English at school and another language at home.
Now, what makes college feel like a huge paradigm shift for most people is the fact that this barrier of separation between school and home doesn't exist anymore, or at the very least not nearly as strongly. There's less routine - you can choose when to have lunch and dinner, you walk to different buildings instead of staying in the same one all day in the same classroom (of course if you're an architecture major that's another story) - all in all, boundaries are just blurred. Take my school campus in Ann Arbor, for example. We have school buildings like the computer labs, buildings with hundreds of classrooms in them, libraries, etc. mixed in with restaurants, bubble tea, bars, poster shops, movie theaters...
Now as far as the school mixed with the city, I didn't have that in high school, but as far as the interconnectedness between school and home i.e. dorm life, that was there. I was used to selecting my own schedule and juggling all the different classes that I wanted to take, figuring out what sort of time commitments I could make while staying sane, worrying about "drama" rather than being isolated at home...
So none of that was new to me so I never really gave it much thought. I wasn't used to the fact that academics were suddenly important (a shortcoming of my high school I'll readily concede) and the heavy workload, but I had developed the mentality and fundamentals to concentrate and work hard - it was simply a matter of redirection.
That's my explanation for why I've been lazy about posting about school.
So today I'm going to talk about college. Yeah, it's sort of strange going into this at the beginning of my junior year rather than freshmen year - my standard excuse for this sort of thing is that I'm lazy, which while being true doesn't really encompass everything. To be honest, there were aspects of college that I did not find all that different from high school (of course, there are many aspects that are completely different which I really didn't thin about) and thus it was harder to take notice of them without putting some serious thought into it.
First off, some background. I was born in the United States and lived there until I was 11, going to private schools for the most part, living a fairly typical moderately well-off Asian-American life as far as education goes (if a bit more WASP-y than some) until I moved to Taiwan after the summer of 5th grade. From there my path started to become a bit more unique. Of course, everyone's path to unique - even siblings who grow up in the same home and go to the same school cannot be exactly the same, but this would make the differences shaping me into the man I am today even more pronounced than they would probably be otherwise.
I was homeschooled for 3 years, starting from 6th grade and ending 8th grade - when I tell people this, many assume that it's because I'm a Christian (though most wouldn't know that I wasn't one all my life) and my parents felt that public education is too secular or something along those lines. It's not an altogether unreasonable assumption, though it amuses me to no end because of how un-conservative I am. Nope, basically it was because the level of my Chinese language ability was... well, let's just say inadequate. I could carry on a conversation in Mandarin and function in Taiwan, but I couldn't read and write. To be honest, I can't really remember how I became proficient - it seems all of a sudden after several years I opened a newspaper and found out I could actually read. There are some more memorable methods that I remember - guess and check with my parents when we were on the street, which involved my brother and I trying to figure out what some signs said, oftentimes making unintentional but hilarious mistakes. My parents also introduced manga to me - Japanese-style comic books, albeit translated into Chinese. It was the first time I had ever encountered anything like that, and I was absolutely hooked. The series that I recall learning the most from was "Slam Dunk" by Takehiko Inoue, one about a newcomer to basketball learning the ropes because the girl he had a crush on absolutely loved basketball or something like that. I made noob mistakes when reading like mistaking 帥 for 師 - the former meaning "handsome" and the latter meaning "teacher/master", and 耍 for 要 - the former meaning something along the lines of "showboating" and the latter meaning "wanting".
Then I went to an experimental high school in the mountains (roughly 500 meters, so not all that high actually but enough so that the weather was nice and cool) and there my Chinese *really* improved. When you're tossed into an environment when you're forced to do something and you have a reasonable foundation for it you can really mature and grow.
... where was I?
Oh right, why I didn't really have any profound thoughts on college until now. (Actually I'm highly doubtful about the profound nature of all this) So my school was experimental in that it returned the initiative to learn back to the students, something that most Taiwanese schools don't do at all. What does this mean? For a while I had a hard time describing what exactly was "alternative" about my high school's style of education. We could choose our own classes, though there were certain "core" ones we had to complete for graduation, we lived in dorms away from home and ate in a cafeteria, there were many liberal arts classes that would be considered "extra-curricular" in most schools... how can I describe all that? Then my Dad said, "Basically, it's like college."
Dang, that basically summed it up right there. The teachers certainly minded and were concerned if you didn't go to class and what not but they wouldn't beat your ass over it; you could take just 12 credits a semester and the only person you were cheating was yourself, if you wanted to plan an event the initiative was on you and interested parties to apply for funding and what not...
Thus explains why in a sense coming to the University of Michigan wasn't *that* big of a transition. I'd say in a typical (I use this term loosely) education there is quite a separation between high school and college - the single most significant one is the disappearance of a barrier between school life and "home" life during the semester, for most students. (Obviously if you commute this does not apply to you quite as much) In a typical high school the average day when school's in is divided into two or three portions, depending on how you categorize things - school, extra-curricular, and home. For simplicity's sake only two are important for now - school, and home. Both are generally completely different environments. They have different cultures, figures of authority, time orientation, food ^_^; etc.
Typically, you go to school in the morning and return home in the afternoon, helping to create a clean divide between the two with very little overlap. In middle school for me, the schedule went class class class lunch class class class go home. At home there are things to do, like dishes or chores or practicing violin and what not, but it's not a schedule per se; for the most part you just do them and the rest of your time is for your discretionary use.
What's also interesting (but probably altogether not uncommon) is that you can be one person at school and another at home. You don't have lunch in the cafeteria the same way you have it at home, you don't insult your classmates the same way you would your brother (shock!), you tell different jokes at home since your parents probably don't have the same sense of humor that your classmates do, and if you were raised in a minority home like I was then there's also the chance that you spoke English at school and another language at home.
Now, what makes college feel like a huge paradigm shift for most people is the fact that this barrier of separation between school and home doesn't exist anymore, or at the very least not nearly as strongly. There's less routine - you can choose when to have lunch and dinner, you walk to different buildings instead of staying in the same one all day in the same classroom (of course if you're an architecture major that's another story) - all in all, boundaries are just blurred. Take my school campus in Ann Arbor, for example. We have school buildings like the computer labs, buildings with hundreds of classrooms in them, libraries, etc. mixed in with restaurants, bubble tea, bars, poster shops, movie theaters...
Now as far as the school mixed with the city, I didn't have that in high school, but as far as the interconnectedness between school and home i.e. dorm life, that was there. I was used to selecting my own schedule and juggling all the different classes that I wanted to take, figuring out what sort of time commitments I could make while staying sane, worrying about "drama" rather than being isolated at home...
So none of that was new to me so I never really gave it much thought. I wasn't used to the fact that academics were suddenly important (a shortcoming of my high school I'll readily concede) and the heavy workload, but I had developed the mentality and fundamentals to concentrate and work hard - it was simply a matter of redirection.
That's my explanation for why I've been lazy about posting about school.
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