October - Mid-term

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The exams were a piffle. I couldn't believe it. I hesitate to say this, but they were mickey mouse.

Forty years ago, in high school, I remember practically having to memorize the textbooks, but on our mid-term exams we were asked true and false questions, we did a test that was similar to one I had to do when registering with a temp agency to find me administrative work, and for the desktop publishing, dear, sweet Prof Ellen hovered around us ready to answer any questions we didn't know how to answer.

Did education change that much in 40 years? People talked among themselves during the exams, possible asking and giving answers to one another. The professors did not seem to mind. They did forbid looking up answers in notes on the internet, which miffed some students.

Later I talked to Prof Judy about it.

"Oh yes," she said. "It's changed since our day. Kids today are not used to getting strong challenges in school. Some have never written exams. Failure wasn't allowed."

Maybe I was ready for tougher questions, but they sure aren't.

This did not help with my confusion. The gulf is worse than I thought. But it was now a whole week of mid-term break and I planned to catch up on the sleep I had missed in the last 6 weeks, except that I still had an essay to write for Mike's class on History and Politics.

We had to write the history of the neighborhoods in which we grew up, and the part of our forebears played in it. This would have been fine. I love history, except like the progress of my professional life, that was a complete checkerboard in my life as well.

My parents were born in Europe, I moved here when I was 4. I no longer lived where I lived out my childhood and my parents and forebears' contributed virtually nothing to the history or any neighborhood I lived in my life. We had all been gypsies in every metaphofical interpretation of the word. The neighborhood in which I grew up was also in Winnipeg, still another city, and very few records of that neighborhood were kept outside of Winnipeg.

I was to spend my mid-term break researching, via long distance, the history of a place whose history was recorded very scantily and mostly in the memories of people, who were either dead or whom I no longer knew.

October - Partnering

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My next PowerPoint presentation was for Prof Gerard's class. This had to be with a partner of one's choosing. Two students must select a recent newsmaker, from recent news, to interview further about whatever it is about him or her that is making news. I panicked. My classmates had already formed groups, friends, partnerships and I did not belong to any of those categories. I could think only of Carol, who had not been in class for a week due to court appearances for her divorce.

I called Carol and she assured me she would be available to help me do the thing. Her time and availability was very unstable what with her daughter, ex-husband, finances and travel problems, but she had the fire in her belly and the maturity I had not spotted in too many of my other possible partner choices. We set to it, phoned a bunch of people we found in the newspaper. The first one to call back was one of Carol's ideas. Carol talked to him from her home which is two cities away from mine.

Carol got the interview, so the only thing for me to do was to design the presentation. I consider myself fairly talented in the design department and had no problem putting her interview into a visual context. We worked very hard on this assignment and I sent the finished presentation to her about 10 PM Thursday night. Friday morning we had to present it.

Friday morning I was up there while Carol screened the PowerPoint and I was surprised to discover that she had changed my design totally - but totally! Only one slide was recognizable as mine, so I panicked as had become a habit with me by this time. I insisted on talking to Gerard about it.

Carol got all upset and thought I was going to dump on her but that was not what I was planning to do. We had talk and a beer over it and I explained what upset ne was that I had no idea how to keep control of my work in a group work situation. I I wanted to ask Gerard how we were to make sure that our work would stand out in a group's.

The reason I was worried about this was, of course, again, I knew sometime in the future I would have to work with "them", the young ones and being on totally different planets vis-a-vis thinking, planning, studying, experiencing and producing I wanted to know how to keep some kind of control over my own work integrity.

I dreaded having to work with "them". I had already worked on magazines and newspapers and had gone through quite a few trials and tribulations to be a productive individual under trying circumstances. They had not. I didn't want to be like them, acting clued out and jumping into the first joke to avoid dealing with the assignment.

I was afraid I would have to play the role of mommy or teacher, dragging them along after me. In some ways this was not a bad option, but I had to be realistic also, If I was to be an effective mommy or teacher I had to answer the question, "Well, what the hell are you doing here then, with us?" Yeah.

Gerard helped Carol and I resolve our conflict. I had to admit her design was better, but he said next time make it clear ahead of time what your terms within a partnership are. If I want design approval, state that ahead of time. If I want responsibility for one part of the project only than I should make that obvious, and make it clear I would not allow it to be changed behind my back. I felt better after that, but not much.

Mid-term exams were coming up, I was consumed with studying as I had not done in 40 years, and beginning to feel the weight of assignments still to be completed. I was working through all the free periods, any time I had at home, and on weekends. Often I was writing articles late at night that were due the next morning.

I could do this because I had written articles before and could do them quickly according to format, but I could not figure out how anyone who did not have my professional experience and had not read as much as I did could keep up the pace.

October - Studies and Partnership

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I mentioned that meeting and making friendship and relationships was a very difficult thing here didn't I? No time for social clubs, living in a different city, and totally out of sync with 99% of the student body. As I said, at least I had a purpose and I was busy.

There is not a lot of time for thinking in the journalism program. We are too busy doing things. If I thought college would be a place for contemplative walks that inspire higher thoughts this wasn't that kind of college.

Basically we were told to think of ourselves as being hired to apprentice journalism. Every assignment was the job we were supposed to perform in order to keep the job.

At the beginning it was quite simple. In the History of Journalism class we were to make a 5 minute PowerPoint presentation on a famous journalist whose name we would draw out of a plastic bag. The names began with Daniel Defoe in the 17th century, who is considered to be the first journalist. The assignment was to present all the important points and contributions in this person's life. The class had to be aware of who this person and why he was important in the history of journalism.

I pulled the name of Daniel Pearl. This was okay with me because I was aware of his story and quite moved by it. His life and tragic death were the subject of a book, A Mighty Heart, written by his wife, Mariane Pearl, later made into a movie starring Angelina Jolie.

Danny Pearl was an investigative journalist, bureau chief for Asia for The Wall Street Journal who was investigating al-Qaeda connections in January 2002 in Pakistan. For this he was kidnapped by a jihadist group who executed him by beheading him, video-taping his killing and sending the video to the police. His body was cut into 10 pieces and buried in a shallow grave beside a highway outside Karachi, where it was found 3 months later. It was a warning for foreign journalists to stay out of Pakistan.

In researching the story I watched the movie and read the book. I was so emotionally moved by Danny's story and Mariane's love and the awful tragedy of the whole thing. The story consumed my senses all the while I was working on it. I had to design the perfect background for the PowerPoint, I needed the photos and images to be just so and I timed the points in the story to perfection over and over again. I began to wish I had chosen an easier subject, maybe Horace Greeley or Jonathan Swift, people I could never see as contemporaries and potential friends as I could the Pearls.

Prof Marilyn however, docked me marks because I concentrated not on Daniel Pearl's journalistic accomplishments but on the circumstances of his death. Well, he didn't become famous for his journalism. His journalism, although thoroughly professional, was not of world-renown quality all by itself. Had he not been murdered the way he had, he would have been known perhaps to their peers and readers, but not famous. Daniel Pearl's claim to fame is not his writing, but as a martyr to journalism.

But no, that's not what Marilyn wanted. Anyway, I was glad to lose the marks because I could not have done the story the way she wanted, exploring article after article on Wall Street Journal topics while ignoring the elephant in the room which was his death.

Marilyn's next assignment was for us to read at least 3 daily newspapers and select articles that represented certain nine different themes she was covering in her course. Some were common and would be easy to find, but many were obscure like "the purpose of newspapers".

Marilyn is a lover of the physical newspaper and dreads the day it will disappear. I suspect she created this assignment to force us to buy 3 newspapers a day and maybe help save the industry. Ha! In her dreams. I now became a prowler of garbage cans and recycle bins and a cafe thief.

October - One of my worries is settled

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I managed to raise all the money I hoped to raise for this academic year, but I had factored in a part-time job and for all of September I did not find one.

I had hoped to be hired by the office or the library at the college but applied too late. Plan B was to get a job at nearby malls or industrial parks, or frankly anywhere, doing anything I can get. I did shudder at those possibilities since part-time student jobs could be pretty gruesome, jobs were scarce and likely I would have to take anything that I was offered.

Well, lucky for me, I saw an ad on a bulletin board at the school for a Studio Monitor. The Theatre and Drama Studies program needed someone to go into the studios their students used for classes and/or rehearsals and check to see that all the equipment and props were in their right places. Each studio has a specific list of equipment that frequently gets borrowed by almost anybody for almost anything and it was up to me to hunt it down if it was missing and to make sure, that by the end of the day everything in the studio looked like it did at the beginning of the day. By the time I applied one sofa and two mattresses had already been missing for awhile.

I wasn't the best choice for the job, but I was the only one who applied. As usual, Patrick, my boss, was surprised when he first saw me. I am almost used to seeing the surprised look on people's faces when I explain that no, I am not staff, no I am not faculty, no I am not a parent, I am a full-time student. However, he was easily prepared to be convinced that at the age of 63 I was willing to move furniture around and mop up 6 studios because it was already October and no one had yet applied for the job. I don't know why not. It was not that hard, a fairly relaxed work ethic when no furniture had been "borrowed" and paid $10 an hour which was as much as anyone could expect to be paid for a student job.

Patrick is a former professional actor who is now Professor of Theatre and Drama Studies on a joint program with this College and a university. He selects all the plays the students will work on and they all need to have the exact number of male and female performers as his classes, which is quite the challenge finding such plays. He hoped to find a resident student because the studios tend to be used until about 10 PM and it works best if the Studio Monitor can come after that time and straighten things up.

However, since I go home to a city two hours commuter travel away, and I was the only one who applied, and he was desperate, we agreed I would be on the job from 5:30 to 7:30. That was when I had to leave to make sure I caught the 8:30 train and had a chance to make it home for 10:00 PM providing I could ride my bike from the train station and it wasn't raining.

There have been occasions when I did not leave on time to catch the train. In that case home would happen an hour later.

The job was the best I could expect under my circumstances. I am almost never supervised and as long as things are okay, no one needs to supervise my work. Most of the time items are not moved around, or if they are they are moved back. Aside from having to pick up an amazing amount of half full water bottles, sweep up Doritos and Goldfish crackers and worm gummies off the floors and re-stack the stacking chairs. The rest of the time I work on my assignments from my laptop and keep one ear open for anything amiss in the studios. Patrick is happy that someone is there and that alone is a deterrent from stuff disappearing.

I get to listen to the students rehearsing their songs from musicals like Oklahoma and do their tap routines. The prop and set design department is part of my jurisdiction. Another time I had to walk through the hallways with my brooms. Students were rehearsing scenes in the hallways and I could only get past by walking through their scenes. They'd be yelling or swearing or threatening to kill each other, or trying to kill each other and I just walk through with, "excuse me, excuse me".

The missing sofa and mattresses were found under the studio theatre stage and returned to their own rooms.