Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.

It’s impossible to borrow lecture notes from someone who calls you “Sir.”

As a sir, you’ll have trouble rounding up partners for group projects. Sirs don’t sit on hallway floors with the other students, no matter how willing their knees might be. Sirs should avoid making jokes (the kids won’t laugh, or worse, they’ll laugh too hard).

They’ve had a lot of experience with sirs and ma’ams. They know about our penchant for offering advice and insights— especially when not solicited. They give us a wide berth.

But if you can be patient—and if you let it be known you got the lowest score on a recent lab quiz—they’ll reward you with a bit of cred. Eventually a kid named Ian will call you by your first name and you can risk humor again. In small doses.

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.

The “Freshman Fifteen” is shorthand for the pounds kids put on during their first year at college.

They line up in front of all-you-can-eat dormitory buffets, desserts included. Between meals there are chips, pastries, sugar-glazed sugar and fried salt. There’s even an industry that ships snacks to remind students their parents wuv them.

Academic stress plays a role too—adrenaline and cortisol spike. Eat something! The eight-hundred-pound gorilla is alcohol. There are rumors about keggers but somehow I haven’t gotten invited to any. What’s that about?

Freshman gain an average of 8 pounds in their first year—some even more. Most of them work off their Freshman Fifteen before they work off their student loans, which really isn’t saying much.

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.

— If you float to the top of the river—the gods have judged you to be innocent.

— When you dissect a mallard and its gizzard is out of place in relation to its liver, your spice shipment from Cathay has been lost to pirates.

—Nasty pustules oozing Black Death? Those cranky, cranky gods.

— In the mid 1600s, a Englishman named John Usher calculated that the Earth was created in 4004 BC. His reckonings were so convincing they were printed in the margins of the King James Bible.

There’s an idea that runs through my Science and Humanities textbooks: People often make great progress when they challenge their gods. Ironically change has often been punished as heresy throughout history. (Maybe I should excuse myself now if you don’t mind—they’re piling sticks around that stake over there.)

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.

Something unnatural is happening in Room 250.

Precise rows of seats have been placed to face the lectern at the front of the room. Separately, a handful of chairs line one of the walls. This is where The Lost Boys insist on sitting for an hour and a quarter of lecture time—isolated from the rest of us. They are on familiar terms, these guys, entertaining one another with sly eye contact and non-verbals.

Because they’ve shunted themselves to the side, seats that are intended for them remain empty. The odds of a girl seating on either side of those yawning voids is near certitude.

We’re well into our second month now and the Lost Boys are still hugging the side of the room. It hasn’t occurred to even one of them that taking a seat next to a lovely young anthropology student can do wonders for a guy’s weekend.

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.

Something unnatural is happening in Room 250.

Precise rows of seats have been placed to face the lectern at the front of the room. Separately, a handful of chairs line one of the walls. This is where The Lost Boys insist on sitting for an hour and a quarter of lecture time—isolated from the rest of us. They are on familiar terms, these guys, entertaining one another with sly eye contact and non-verbals.

Because they’ve shunted themselves to the side, seats that are intended for them remain empty. The odds of a girl seating on either side of those yawning voids is near certitude.

We’re well into our second month now and the Lost Boys are still hugging the side of the room. It hasn’t occurred to even one of them that taking a seat next to a lovely young anthropology student can do wonders for a guy’s weekend.