The Expense of Paper
I got my ASU Bachelor’s of Science in CS Degree Diploma in the mail yesterday. I’m proud of the achievement and I’m very grateful to the university that has allowed me to sustain my life financially. However, has the cost of such paper really made an impact? Let’s see…Here’s a bit of history…
I started my post-high school education by taking classes at the college I now work for more than 10 years ago. At the time, I was preparing for a 2-year stint as a missionary for the LDS church at some location to be determined later, so I was only going to school part time. When I was in high school, I was always looking for the next thing in life. Not that I was bored with being in high school, but I knew that there were bigger and better things out there, whereas several of my classmates were calling it quits right then and there as far as moving beyond secondary education. Although I have always been a rather intelligent (but humble) person, when I started my college education I felt that I wouldn’t have the smarts needed to score well on standardized tests and get scholarships to other schools. So I never took the SAT or applied for scholarships. Looking back on it now, I probably could have and should have done so, but that was my choice at the time.
When I graduated from high school, I was a little timid about invoking a level of seriousness about college, knowing that leaving my secular education on the back burner for 24 or more months while I was a missionary may cause me to forget things that I had learned. So it was mostly night school, with me looking for full-time work to earn enough money to get me started on my initial journey to serve as a missionary for the Lord. The type of work experiences I had during this time was a period of serious growth for me, and I may expound on them later on.
It was during this time that my dad, who by trade was an electrical engineer, purchased our first family PC. My family used it mostly to write letters among other things, but I was very curious as to how it worked. It was very modest by today’s standards…it had a 386 processor running at 20 MHz, a whopping 4MB of ram, and a 120 MB hard disk. I remember thinking at the time that there was no way we could ever outgrow the capabilities of that machine…how little did I realize. Anyway, being the curious person that I was, I was interested in learning how to write little programs, make music with it, access bulliten board services (BBS) with our 2400 baud modem, and fine tune the bane of computing at the time: Microsoft Windows 3.1 (scary…I know).
When it was time to leave for my missionary service, I had it in my mind that I was either going to learn how to really compose music, or really learn how computers worked once and for all one way or the other.
I was called to serve in the Canada Toronto West mission for the LDS church, and I could go on and on about the many amazing experiences and growth I had while I was there. Some of my most humbling and growing times in my life occured in a land that wasn’t where I grew up, but that I called home for 2 years of my life.
I returned home in January of 1996, one day after classes started back up at MCC. I had homework my first day of not even being at school. My parents paid for my first few semesters of school, but I wanted to eventually pay them back, and also to finish the rest of my education by paying for it myself. At one time I was working 2 and 1/2 jobs while taking a full credit load in school, but that’s another story…my several different jobs that I had when I was in college.
At the time I was taking classes in both music theory/composition and computer science with the foolish belief that I could double-major in both when I transferred to a 4 year institution. I soon came to the realization that it was physically and academically impossible to do this, so I had to choose. To make a really long and boring story much shorter, I decided to major solely in computer science for economic reasons. I would still keep my foot in the music world and take occasional music theory, composition, and performance classes for sanity checks when dealing with all sorts of classes that required me to stretch my ability to think in abstract mathematical terms. Thus began my marathon college education. More than 10 years after it started and 2 associates degrees from MCC later, I finally have a piece of paper to prove that I could do it. So…since the purpose of higher education is a much higher level of learning, one could ask me “well…what have you learned?”
I have compiled a list of some of the the more obvious things:
- Often times the process of being educated is more valuable than the actual education itself. At some points in my education I had to ask myself why I was killing myself? There were many many nights of hard studying in the library where many prayers were offered to help me to learn things that my brain just wasn’t naturally capable of exellence in execution, such as mathematics and physics. In fact I remember walking accross the lawn in front of the MCC library one night wondering what it was all for.
- Success in learning very much depends on both the student and the teacher. I would really like to say that all my professors were good at this, but unfortunately not. I had a math teacher (who shall remain nameless) in a class that I was struggling with. I was getting tutoring in the library and trying to do the homework, but just wasn’t getting it. I was failing the course. After a lecture, I made an attempt to approach him with my difficulties. In between the dismissal of class and the next period, a math department associate of his had walked into the room and began shooting the breeze with him. I was approaching him for help when I overheard their discussion. The professor that had just walked in must have asked him how his course was going, and I heard my professor explain…”These kids are just so stupid…how are they ever going to learn?” Disheartened, I walked out of the classroom and headed straight for the records department to drop the course. I took a withdrawal with a failing grade. I didn’t get any reimbursement for my tuition. The next semester I took the same course again in a night-class setting with a teacher who obviously loved teaching. She taught high-school math during the day, and taught college math at night. Needless to say, this made all the difference. I did my homework every night, I took initiative to study hard for tests, and I even ended up getting an ‘A’ in the class. This was the only ‘A’ in a math class I ever got in my life and I was very proud of it. Right then and there, I resolved that if I was ever given charge of teaching a course, I knew what kind of a teacher I wanted to be.
Anyway, there are many more stories that I may put up later, but I hope this has gone to prove a few things about our lives…that they should be every bit of an education as is getting a piece of paper from a learning institution that says you are educated. Egos and mental capabilities are such a small piece of the pie when it comes to the desserts of the feast of life’s offerings.
Very soon, I will have a few posts that will emphasize the reason this website is named ‘Spiritual Slide Shows’, so stay tuned.