October - Mid-term

Posted by Krystyna Hunt in

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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.