Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.

A student became difficult in a second-floor, physical-science lab yesterday. Nobody shot him.

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.

Once you slice open the shipping boxes that contain your rental textbooks, you are L.B. Jefferies and you’re deep into Rear Window mode.

Every scholar who has ever rented those books and highlighted the pages stands naked before you.

You identity them first by color: The kid with the pink highlighter, for example, obsesses over specifics; the yellow highlighterer has a thing for overwritten paragraphs; Ms. Orange is all about chapter summaries. You can guess race, ethnicity and gender by underscores in the subculture sidebars. And then there are the kids who violate the margins: “This is total bullshit!” is my favorite.

Campbell Cream of Tomato Soup stains (popular at greek houses) say more about table manners than intellectual capacity. Stiff, warped pages means the book had slipped into bath water.

Start by flipping through the pages to see which highlights vanish after the early chapters, the student has dropped the class or decided to blow it off. Either way you don’t want to use their glyphs as a study guide.

 

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.

The team struggled frantically. But no matter what they tried his body wouldn’t climb above room temperature. The subject on the gurney remained unresponsive—he refused to breathe. There was zero probability, but they worked on.

Down on the floor it was a different story. As if upon signal, a traumatized accident victim, all splints and tourniquets, rose miraculously and traded places with the paramedic who had been attending her. There were no actual lives or limbs in danger but there was risk and urgency. The students needed to prove their knowledge and deftness to survive as paramedics.

Fire Science Technology (firefighters, emergency responders, paramedics) is one of many certificate programs that can lift a life above the minimum wage. After two or three semesters, the holder of a certificate can be a contender.

Many certificate students go on prosper in the trades, start businesses, create wealth and jobs. Many of them become the intensely motivated, street-savvy, forty-year-old freshmen who ask for nothing but the opportunity to eat your lunch.

The Fire Science instructors were happy to let me hang around. They wanted me to climb on the gurney and take the place of the dummy. They said they would bring me back to life.

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman

Exquisite creatures of all colors and shapes prance about. Snap your fingers, rainbows appear. Fruits are low-hanging. Constipation has been eradicated. This is a new and wondrous place.

Our professor, who signs emails with her first name, asked us to pull our chair-desks into a circle—so each of us can share opinions, they are all equally important. We’re going to talk and discuss and debate and then interview each other. We’ll read body language as well as textbooks.

All of my earlier schooling happened before everything changed. I have no idea what to expect. This is exciting. This is why I’m here.

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman

I always knew this would be a humbling experience.

One afternoon a group of us were grinding away at geological map data. I whipped out my Pilot G2 Writing Instrument (6 for $7.29, Target) and solved a long-division percentage calculation by hand, citing the number of feet in a mile off the top of my head—I wasn’t showing off, this was grade school stuff for my generation. I knew I was being watched. “You’re a genius!” a young woman sighed toward me.

Moments of triumph are often fleeting. Within seconds, He-Who-Doesn’t-Give-A-Flying-Expletive announced that my answer was wrong, wrong, wrong—almost instantly he had stumbled upon a childishly, embarrassingly, pathetically simple solution to the problem. To make things worse, He-Who was right.

I always knew this would be a humbling experience.