Virtual College

When my son was in college a few years ago, it was like I was back in college, and it was just as dumb as it was the first time. Once he called for help with his English class. They had watched "Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," and he was supposed to write two paragraphs on how satire was used in the movie.

To submit his paper, he had to post his thoughts on an electronic discussion board, which was a lot different from when I was in college and we actually wrote on paper and handed it in. At the time, he didn't own a computer or know how to type, so he would call me on his cell phone from the computer lab, I would log into the same discussion board from home and I'd type in what he dictated.

On this particular evening, before he could think of something profound to say about the use of satire in "Dr. Strangelove," a campus policeman flashed a card in front of his face which said the use of cell phones in the computer lab was forbidden. So he logged out and walked home, dictating his two paragraphs to me as he walked. I typed it into the discussion board.

This may not be the college I remember, but thinking about "Dr. Strangelove" is. College is a lot of information you will never use again. Dr. Strangelove had nothing to do with his major either, a technical trade that requires no philosophical thought. There were 200 people in his class in an auditorium setting. At the first session, the professor taught relaxation and meditation technique to prepare for the semester. In preschool, this was called nap time.

Before I logged out of the discussion board, I read what the other students were writing and was appalled to find even in an English class, they were submitting their "papers" in email style writing -- all caps or no caps at all, minimal punctuation if any, and no paragraph breaks. They were not learning to write, spell, or punctuate in this class, although there was an advisory to utilize the spellcheck.

The next week my son called again because he needed to analyze three poems and didn't know how to think about poetry. The poems were vaguely related to "Dr. Strangelove," being anti-war and satirical. For each, the professor's online instructions were to "tell how the poem deepens your contact with its content." And, the instructions prodded, "don't forget to say why this poem is good, and what you wonder about."

What if I wonder why the professor presupposes I think the poem is good? What if my contact doesn't deepen? What if the poem is stupid? What if I think most poetry is a fraud, especially the stuff that doesn't rhyme or have any iambic in its pentameters?

My son got angry with me. "We have to take this seriously. It's a grade."

Well, okay, but it's difficult to discuss poetry and what it means and how our contact is deepening when one of us is making an illegal cell phone call with a dying battery from the computer lab and the other is reading the poem for the first time. I read the poem that begins with the line "McNamara Rusk Bundy." Then it vaguely talks about children in a school yard. Do college sophomores today know what McNamara Rusk Bundy means? That's from the '60s.

"They were poets in the '60s?" my son asks. No. They were government guys involved in the Vietnam War. How old is your teacher that he's going back to the '60s for war protest poems? My son points out that "Dr. Strangelove" is pre-Vietnam War. He has a point. Our contact with the content is actually deepening after all.

My own English professor many years ago was a young man who was teaching to avoid the draft and ending up in Vietnam himself. He wore sandals and sat on top of his desk, cross-legged. His favorite book, from which he obtained his philosophy of life, and from which he taught, was "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis."

To put this in historical context, before there was "Gilligan's Island," there was a show called "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis" based on this book about a frustrated college boy. Bob Denver, who would go on to play Gilligan, played Dobie's beatnick friend, Maynard G. Krebbs. His catch phrase was "You rang?" To put beatnicks into historical context, before stoners, there were surfer dudes, and before surfer dudes, there were hippies, and before hippies, there were beatniks. Hey, I should be teaching college.

All this I remember, yet I can't think of much I actually learned in college that was useful when I went to work. I learned all the work stuff on the job, or by teaching myself things I needed to know to get a certain job.

Still, everyone will tell you that you need a college degree in life. All a college degree means, though, is you went through a lot of crazy hoops and ordeals over a period of time. Maybe that in itself is some kind of preparation for life -- except now we don't get graded.