College memories

I wrote down every college class I’ve been in, and it made me proud. It filled me with memories, lessons learned and lost. People I’d forgotten. Pans I’ve been and no longer am.

And more than that. I’ve been in college for seven years and I’ve spread my interests wider than I sometimes imagine.

Here is the depth and breadth of my formal academic training.

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2010-2011 Peninsula community college

Botany
English 101

Fall. I remember our fieldtrips, wandering outside the little schoolhouse that was the Port Townsend extension - planted literally in my backyard. There was a little trail I carved from my room to the college, often taken at a run as I came in close on time.

I am 16, to turn 17 on an unobtrusive Wednesday, in botany.
I struggle in botany. I love the teacher, Barbara, and often stay after to ask her questions. One evening she tells me that many of my questions are chemistry questions, but when I ask my advisor she says I don’t have the math to take it.

English is a dream. We write an essay a week, and learn logical fallacies on the side. William Cecil is an amazing teacher, he lets his students teach him.


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Philosophy
English 102

Winter. Philosophy is awful. Not the subject but the teacher. Our textbook is a cartoon guide to ancient Greek philosophy. The teacher is more concerned with the personalities than ideas.

I never study, rarely open my textbook. I show up every week but I begin to draw in class. This brings the interest of several classmates and soon I'm talking to people on breaks. It feels good.

One class I'm trying to draw a Kabbalah and can't get the lines right. I ask a Jewish classmate if she knows, and she turns around and pulls up her shirt and there it is tattooed on her back.

“What's the other symbol overlaying it?” I ask.
“That's Metatron’s cube" she tells me. It's the beginning of Metatron appearing everywhere in my life. I got an A in Philosophy.

In English we've dropped the formality of the five paragraph essay and moved on to personal essays. I find myself falling in love with the form.
I start to build more community here too. Few people let me edit their essays twice. I build a reputation for being ruthless on paper. It's just that I take editing seriously.


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Popular culture
Environmental science

I keep following Cecil. Out of English and into his fascination with the world. We have massive discussions on the nature of things, activities where we each conceive of a competing lemonade stand, and see a little more of what a corporation is looking at. We spend a week without any sort of media, a week tracking our time usage, a week watching the news on television, a week reading a New York bestseller. We talk about everything.

Environmental science goes by in a blur. I don't remember much of it. Tests I barely passed and slideshows I struggled to stay awake for. The only things that stuck with me is how recyclable aluminum is, and the difference between S and J curve populations. I passed, barely.


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2011-2012


History
Public speaking

I almost took my philosophy teacher again. There were so few choices. I decided instead to begin waking up at 7:30 - to bus two hours, two towns away, and take what I wanted.

History ended up being taught by one of my childhood friend's father though I didn't realize it till the end if the quarter. He wasn't a great teacher. I got a sense of early civilization, but not much more than I already had. He was prone to yelling at people. I did a paper on Augustine and his theology and got an A.

Public speaking was why I'd come. I'd signed up late so I was on the waiting list, but I kept coming and asked if I could audit the class if I didn't get in. Partly because I was trying to impress Laura, the teacher, I was active in class. Answering questions. Engaging with the material.

The second week she let me in as an exception.

“Public speaking ranks higher than death on the national poll of people's fears" Laura told us the first day. “this class is as much about fear as it is about anything else.” She was a good teacher.

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Interpersonal communication
Creative writing

And I kept following Laura as I had followed Cecil before her. There were no speeches to give this time, but interpersonal communication was fascinating and I still notice things I learned in that class. Where are everyone's feet pointed in a conversation? Arms crossed? Clasped behind their back? Relaxed? Where do they try and pull your attention? What words do they emphasize?

One exercise was to spend a week analyzing the body language of our partner. Mine, the beautiful peacock father strewn Guinevere. At the end I gave my analysis. “That's right on.” she said. Got up. Crashed into a wall.

Perhaps too right on.

There was an hour between interpersonal communication and creative writing so I would go sit and wait and often write outside the classroom. Many of my writing classmates would do the same. We began to build an out of class community there. Talking about what we'd read or written, our lives, our hopes and dreams.

The teacher was good. I had a lot of writing assignments, so I began writing on the bus. Four hours a day. Reading it to my friends.

At the end of that quarter I started a writing club to officially do what we had built together.


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Sociology
Playwriting

Sociology was another grey class. Not bad, but not alive or engaging either. The most exciting bit was we never nailed down seats and so I kept ending up in a different place.

I remember three days. The day we talked about twins, nature vs nurture. The day the teacher snapped and decided to stop lecturing and have a discussion instead, and the day he brought a panel of trans people in to answer questions.

Playwriting - with Laura - had all of five people in it. It was wonderful. We talked and wrote and watched plays and to my dismay went on a field trip of going around on the bus in a circle and writing down the conversations we heard word for word. My dialogue got so much better. The end of the school year was a sad one.

2012-2013 Greeners Rock

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Landscapes of Change: Writing and Mapping the Future (Fall - winter)
(creative writing, environmental studies and geography)
Student-Originated Studies in Literary Arts (Spring)
(writing)
Chemistry for Everyone
(organic chemistry)

Evergreen. First time living away from home. First time in a four year college. I wanted to learn this new place so I took Geography. I wanted to succeed so I took writing. Being evergreen they combined it into one program. Writing about place.

We went on a field trip out to Dry falls and it shattered my religious beliefs. We wrote an essay and then halved it's word count and then halved it again and profoundly changed my writing. We went out into Washington's old growth forests and I saw what our woods could become - I can't imagine a better beginning.

Spring brought a “Student originated study" and a mistake. I saw the freshman version of the class with its invitation to projects on mythology, and leapt for it, but the running start had pushed me ahead and they updated my status, making me sign up for the Senior Sophomore class instead.

The teacher was good, but didn't know what to do with a project designed for the other teacher. I was writing my own holy book. How was he to interpret it? Fiction?

Once a week I would go off and do organic chemistry, lured by my botany professor’s comment that my questions were chemistry.


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2013-2014
Writing is a Social Act (Fall - Winter)
(editing)
Patterning the World: Connecting Mathematics and Science (Spring)

The second year I jumped right back into writing. It's always struck me as a skill that will serve me wherever I go and whatever I want to do. Cecil taught me the importance of editing so a class devoted to the practice seemed warranted.

We read all of Moby Dick and listened to the teacher's claims that it was the epitome of good writing. We also brought in examples of writing, good, bad, ours, others, and the whole class chipped at it, laughed at it, and made it better.

These were all writers and here I had people vying to let me edit them a second time. Praising me for the way I cut them down to size. I thrived there but by the end I realized I'd been in writing for too long. It was time to challenge myself.

In spring I took pre-calculus and physics. The class description said they were welcoming people with poor math skills. I had no math skills.

I survived. Barely.


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2014-2015
Metalworking (Fall)
Branching Out: An Ethnobotanical Garden in Community (Fall - Spring)
(ethnobotany)


I could have graduated but I wanted more Evergreen. Instead I decided to conquer my fear of famine.

We learned so many native plants. So many herbs and their myriad uses. The class was built around taking care of the garden around the college longhouse. Homework included weeding.

The teacher was one of the worse I've had, obsessed with vague assignments and lists rather than learning - but I stayed in the class all three quarters anyway. What we were learning was so fascinating.

I learned native stories and we took field trips to the local reservations. I edited the garden website and built my own book of herbs. We had wild food potlucks and I think that now if you were to drop me off in some Washington woods in the summer I could eat comfortably.

Autumn I also learned metalworking. Late nights in the shop, sautering, forging, grinding. I learned to love the forge. Iron and steel and bronze became my metals. I made swords and helmets. It was a good time.


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2015-2016
Matter and Motion (Fall - Spring)

I figured out sometime during ethnobotany that if I went for a dual degree I could get financial aid longer. More Evergreen.

At first I was thinking botany. I'm reasonably good at botany, but then I thought about what science I'd do if I weren't afraid of failing.

Physics.

If I lost my financial aid so be it. I'd just graduate with my BA I'd already earned.

So I went into calculus based physics, following the physics teacher I'd had before, Krishna.

This time I had some idea of what I was getting into. I didn't expect to have any time. I set myself up to spend every open hour in the math lab. Between class and homework I was spending an average of twelve hours a day on school work. I'd come home on breaks and people would ask about my life and I couldn't say anything because I didn't have a life.

Instead I'd go into what I was learning. Waves, inertia, angular momentum - the crazy counterintuitive things I'd never known before.

That year I learned magic. Real magic. My brain stretched to accommodate and I found myself more mentally capable than I'd ever been before.

Suddenly I could do algebra in my head, and memorize things given a moment to concentrate. Suddenly I could think.

And sure I lost credit in chemistry and struggled in calculus and was really the bottom of my entire class. I made it all the way through. I survived again.


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2016
Geography of polar regions (Fall)

I procrastinated on my entrance exam for upper division physics. Procrastinated so successfully that I was rejected and had to scramble for something else. My Financial aid was at its very end, and only paying for upper division science credits at this point.

There was one class that still had space and offered upper division credits. I signed up for it.

Synchronously one of the teachers was the same as the first class I'd taken at Evergreen. Not a good teacher, but a solid one. A lot of the classwork was the same as previously, and after taking a year of physics I felt like there was no homework at all. Everything was easy.

We went on field trips to mt Reiner and The North cascades. Learned about some of the problems polar regions face, and talked a lot about climate change.

By the end, struggling to find a new home, clashing with the not as solid teacher, and discovering that technically my financial aid shouldn't have covered that year, moved my major back to a BA, enrolled to graduate, and stopped doing the schoolwork I didn't want to do.

Why turn in a portfolio when you’ll graduate regardless? I had better uses of my time.

I graduated with a BA in Mythology, Physics, Botany, and Writing - an angry geography teacher, a lot of close friends, the ability to think, and the most liberal education I can imagine.