Marking my progress

I’m not quite sure how it happened.\nI was on the phone with my sister last week. She’s a freshman at Purdue. I asked her how her classes were going, and how much work she had to do and all that other typical stuff. When she asked me how much work I had, I replied, “Oh, not much.”\nSomewhere between freshman year and now I have come to view writing four papers and reading a couple books a week as “not much.”\nThis really struck me, and I began to think about what other changes I have undergone.\nSome obvious answers come to mind. Now, I can almost kind of grow some facial hair that may resemble a five o’clock shadow if you squint. Freshman year, that was out of the question. Also, I now have a firmer grasp on the English language. Let me explain.\nSee, freshman year I took a course in which we read John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty.” Now, I am reading that book again for a class. Deciding to be thrifty, for once, I am using the same book that I used freshman year.\nAs I was reading through and noting the words I circled and phrases I underlined, I came to a very startling conclusion. \nI was an idiot.\nNo use in mincing words here; there’s just no way around it. I seemed to have a quota of pen marks I needed to make and held no regard for their actual placement on the page. \nNot only that, but there are also sections of the book where I seemed to get a little overly excited, putting stars next to almost every paragraph and even in a few instances drawing huge exclamation points in the margin. It’s really kind of embarrassing.\nIt’s also hard to tell if I just had a short attention span and could only make it through a few pages at a time, or if I purposefully changed the color of my highlighter every five paragraphs for some sort of secret color-coded system. I would imagine the former is what happened, but it’s hard to say coming from a kid who underlined the words “is not” on a page, presumably to help Mill out and give him the emphasis he needed.\nApparently, my Attention Deficit Disorder struck in other ways, too. For instance, while I underlined seven phrases on the first page, the markings fall off pretty rapidly. My best estimate is that I didn’t make it past page 30.\nThe point of saying all this is that if it wasn’t clear to me before that my college education has paid off, it is now. I mean, can you imagine me three years ago trying to get a job? I can’t even imagine me getting a job a year from now. Who would hire someone who couldn’t even make it through 30 pages of a book?\nI mean, I could have taught English at Purdue, but other than that, my career choices would have been vastly limited.