OPINION

College wasted on the young

Last week my mother told me my brother-in-law is planning on retiring this August. I don't feel weird about this at all. My brother-in-law is older than me. By about a month.

And when he says he's going to retire, what he means is he's going to stop working as a public school teacher--a band director--and go to work doing something else, probably working for his son-in-law. What he means is he's going to start collecting retirement benefits that he's earned while remaining gainfully employed in another industry. It's not like he's just going to play golf and drink whiskey. (Neither one of which he's very good at, by the way.)

I'm not the kind of person who retires. Maybe I'm the kind of person who gets kicked out, but I'm not going to go willingly. Mainly because I don't know what I'd do if I retired, though I'm pretty good at playing golf and drinking whiskey. Or maybe because I do know, because it's the same thing I'm doing now. So for me, retiring would just be volunteering to give up a paycheck.

I'm not stupid. I already do too much stuff for free.

While I don't intend to retire, that doesn't mean I can't or haven't thought about what I'd do if my time were completely my own. Playing golf and drinking whiskey would get old. If I wasn't going to just keep on doing what I do now, I'd go back to school. I would spend my time trying to learn things.

While I don't have too many regrets, college was wasted on me. I wasn't focused. Studying wasn't a priority. I made good grades because I could. I was competent with math and had decent reading comprehension skills. I could write a lick. (Got my first freelance check when I was 13.) But I was nothing special, just a quiet, jockish kid who sat in the back of the class with a baseball cap pulled down over my eyes. I didn't cause trouble. I definitely benefited from low expectations. I probably surprised a few professors when I turned in something legible. (I had an English professor, a world expert on Jack London, tell me he initially pegged me as a pot dealer and considered trying to score off me.)

Some of those professors were really good. I've got no one to blame but myself for squandering the opportunity; I flat out gamed the system. I hardly ever connected with the material. I'd just prepare enough to do well on tests and almost instantly dump whatever I'd learned in the hallway outside the final exam. I was really happy when I took an advanced placement test and got credit for six hours of French. It didn't bother me at all that I couldn't speak French very well--I just wanted to be six hours closer to graduation, with the foreign language box ticked.

In my defense, I thought that's what you were supposed to do in college. Like a lot of teenagers, I didn't have a handle on the way the world worked. My priorities weren't academic.

I generally had a full-time or almost full-time job as well as various side gigs all though college. I didn't do this because I was a hardship case, but because I liked having money and didn't want to rely on my parents for support. I could have gotten by on a fairly generous scholarship but liked living in an off-campus apartment and having a car.

I'm glad to have done it this way; I didn't have to take out any loans until I got into law school. I appreciate that very few people can graduate from college debt-free today. I got a credential out of it. And that credential may or may not have helped me get my first job in this business. (Though it was probably the photography courses that sealed that sweet $150 a week gig. I could shoot and run a darkroom. )

On the other hand, I'm convinced the Shreveport Journal--my second job in this business--hired me to shore up the infield on its dominant media-league softball team. (Though I might not have been on its radar had I not got that first job.)

It was only after I got out of school that I realized I really liked doing research and thinking about things. Donald Harington once told me I was an autodidactic, and I'd like to think that's true. I've always taught myself things--the first film class I was ever in was one I was teaching.

But while there's nothing stopping me from reading or watching YouTube videos, there are limits to this method. One of the best things about teaching LifeQuest classes is the conversations we have about the movies I show. You get a room full of bright people with lots of interesting life experiences who are invested in the course (this time I'm showing selected episodes of Krzysztof Kiesowski's 1988 Polish TV series Dekalog; it's better than The Sopranos or The Wire) and you will have a good time. Even without whiskey.

I'm not retiring. Probably not ever. But if I get retired, I'm going to try to do this college thing right.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

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Editorial on 02/18/2018

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