School Days, School Days

"A cat sees no good reason why it should obey another animal, even if it does stand on two legs."-- Sarah Thompson


Here we are at Labor Day weekend. I find, even after all these years, I get a bit of a desire to be getting ready to go back to school. There really is nothing keeping me from going back, other than the fact that I STILL don’t know what I want to be when I grow up! Anyway, this got me to thinking about when I actually WAS in school and how things are so different today. Some of the things I went through would seem like a fairy tale to kids today—and even to most of my readers. So here goes, some ancient memories.

In the high school I graduated from, girls HAD to take home economics and boys HAD to take drafting in the ninth grade. End of discussion. Considering just about all of the girls in my class—as well as the rest of the grades—HATED the home ec teacher, a couple of the girls asked to be allowed to take drafting instead. The answer was NO, without explanation. And there was no recourse. This was the way it was and there was no changing it. I’m not exactly sure when this changed—a couple of years later, I believe.

It wasn’t until I was in the tenth or eleventh grade in school before we were allowed to wear pants of any kind to school. Considering most of the school year takes place during snowy weather, you can imagine just how cold we got—and most of us had to walk about a mile to get to the nearest bus stop. This also was during the wearing of ‘micro-mini’ skirts. And, of course, none of us wore boots—it just was not cool. I believe the husband and wife team that the school is named after are just spinning in their graves over the way kids dress these days.

The first university I went to—I have attended two and still am at freshman status :(—was established as a mining engineering school. When I attended, it was primarily an engineering and technology school. The ratio of male to female students was something like 8-1. There were some that didn’t take too kindly to the females coming into the school—one of which was the head of the chemistry department. He was well known to say that women had no business being in any chemistry classes. He had weekly tutoring sessions in his home for groups of students that needed help—but only for male students. (He WAS married, so I believe he was just misogynistic toward female students.) And his attitude was shared by the grad students that ‘watched over’ the freshman classes. The first day I attended my chemistry lab, the grad student in charge told me I was ‘the worst student in the class’ and I ‘had no business being there.’ This came about because I wasn’t proficient with using a slide rule. (We didn’t have pocket calculators back then.) I never attended another chemistry lecture, lab, or class after that day.

I dropped out of this particular school about halfway through the first semester. K and I had been skirting around the issue of where our relationship was heading—kind of hard to have a discussion when we were half a world apart :)—and it seemed as if we might be moving toward marriage. With this in mind—and considering I wasn’t too happy with my academic career—I decided to drop out. To leave, I had to talk to my advisor and get permission, so I made an appointment. I said I wanted to leave because I might be getting married in about a year and wanted to work to save some money. The advisor asked no questions, gave no advice, didn’t try to persuade me to stay, nothing. The permission slip got signed and I was done with the academic world.