Yesterday morning I saw two wiener dogs, the first wiener dogs of 2024. I always declare it a portent, when I see the first wiener dog of the year, and the fact that it took until March 20 either doesn’t bode well or just speaks to how many damn doodles there are anymore.
(Yes, friends, this is the video that sparked my feud with Bob Balaban. I promise I will tell this story next Bob Balaban Day, which is December 5.)
Anyway it is my busy season at work, so I am of course stewing in the great crockpot of nonsense that makes me ornery about higher ed. (Appropriately I am at the college decisions part of my book, which I plan to write more about soon.)
What I’ve been reading
I’m about halfway through The Perennials: The Megatrends Creating a Postgenerational Society by Mauro F. Guillén, which was mentioned in a recent Inside Higher Ed newsletter. Currently it is en vogue to declare that the sequential life pattern — go to school, get married, have a family, retire, die — is sort of arbitrary bullshit and that we should prepare upcoming generations to go to school or get retrained every 20 years instead of picking one thing that will go down on their permanent record and be their job for the rest of their lives. As a barren middle-aged cat lady I agree that the first part is not pre-ordained, but predictably, I have mixed feelings about that second part. On one hand, it would be vastly better for the mental health of Kids Today and is undoubtedly practical given the rapid changes in the workplace, while on the other hand, there’s an insidious undertone of you will work until you die, and to boot you’ll have to spend money to do it, and into that vacuum will traipse a whole host of grifty unaccredited fly-by-night “training opportunities.”
If I hadn’t run out of hands, I’d add this third point, which is blorping out of my contrarian subconscious like a volcanic island from the sea as the higher ed hill I will die on: if we are going to hawk trade schools to Kids Today as a magic alternative to college, we need to acknowledge the effect physical labor has on the human body, as my plumber pointed out when I asked if he would encourage his kid to go into plumbing instead of pursuing an MFA (“my knees say hell no”).* If you’re broken down by 50, what then? Building second careers into our education infrastructure makes sense. If I had any faith in the publishing environment maybe I would have encouraged the plumber to write books instead. Would I read the Great American Plumbing Novel? Or the memoirs of a rural plumber? Hell yes I would.
Guillén also makes the case for the positive effects of intergenerational commingling, which was a key aspect of my half-assed, forgettable education. What a different society we might live in if students today were routinely exposed to older people in a learning environment. At 37 I took a couple classes with the idea I might want to be a speech–language pathologist, and it was clear my mostly female classmates had no idea how to interact with a lady grownup who wasn’t their mom. (What went wrong in your life that you’re here now? was palpable in the classroom.) At 20, you are a ball of anxious, fixed notions of how the life course should work, and often what you need is someone saying “well actually, that’s not always true. Your mom might be wrong. Chill the fuck out.”
Speaking of midlife career changes
Here are some scholarships:
The Heroes in Education: Military Veteran to Classroom Teacher Scholarship is accepting applications through March 25.
The Lockheed Martin Vocational Scholarship is accepting applications through April 1. This was one of my favorite programs to read applications for because there were a lot of older, nontraditional students. I saw the oldest high school transcript I’ve ever seen. (It was from the 1950s. I hope that guy went on to live his dream of going back to school.)
The Sacramento County Black Midwives Scholarship will open for applications on April 3. I realize I probably don’t have many readers in Sacramento but feel free to pass this around - it’s one of the programs I manage, and it’s important work.** Nontraditional students are encouraged to apply.
The Wells Fargo Veterans Scholarship is open till April 10. This is a $5,000 renewable award (what I would consider minimum for a good award).
Speaking of midlife career changes, part 2
Don’t ask me about my thesis. At this point I am probably going to have to take a leave of absence or acknowledge that I wasted a lot of money getting most of a degree. Good thing the man who lives in my house (and has finished like 18 master’s degrees during this time) doesn’t read RBCA because he thinks everything is going swimmingly.
OK, that’s all. Be decent to each other, don’t work too hard, and remember to eat something.
—CB
*Come on, you knew an unasked-for public health opinion was coming. If we’re going to steer kids toward careers in manual labor, we should make physical therapy part of routine care and given that we can’t even make routine care part of routine care, I am not holding my breath.
**Late breaking news: I was just informed that Birthing Beautiful Communities in Cleveland received a $2 million grant from Mackenzie Scott. I have mixed feelings about this type of drive-by philanthropy, but good for them - they do good work to counteract the massive multigenerational health fucked-overedness that’s resulted in abysmal outcomes for black mothers and babies.