015 - Armchair Historians

Not much changed from there. My final few days were filled with more excursions and movies and time together, all underpinned with the ambient buzzing of sexual and romantic tension. We took a day trip to Miami, and I couldn’t believe how the hell that place even functioned. Driving around in her mom’s 2010 Ford Explorer, I felt like a schmuck. Every other car was an import, none more than a few years old at most, many worth more than a Michigan mortgage. I guess Rick James was right — cocaine is a helluva drug.

We went to Vizcaya, an estate-turned-museum on the water some industry magnate had built in the style of Versailles, complete with sprawling gardens, exotic furnishings, themed rooms, and all the things you’d expect from pre-depression decadence. Miami is just crazy. Everyone looks like they're on the way to close their next big deal, or to polish off the better part of a bottle of Moët & Chandon over a late lunch. Downtown at least, that is. Everyone looks like they’re expecting to be seen. The clothes, the cars, the way they walk — I was starting to get why Miami had the reputation it did. People were there to make a lot of money, or spend a lot of money, no middle ground. Success and excess.

But before too long, it was time to go back to the snowy Robocop dystopia that was Detroit. Back to awkward academia. My life was fracturing more and more. Before I met V, my social life was split between local and virtual. Now even more of my social life, and possibly a budding romance had taken up even more real estate. I was a stranger to everyone. Like after Vegas, the truth once more seemed too heavy a burned to disclose to my friends. To them, I met V through mutual friends, that she had had some modeling gig in Detroit and that’s how we got acquainted...all bullshit. I was tired of my life being qualified by adjectives that made it less-than. “Online” friends. Friends “from the game”. Why the qualifiers? Why the labels, why the categorizations?

I was a stranger to my family as well. When I left that factory and that house and all those problems **** Lake seemed to dredge up, I was fucking gone. I scheduled myself out of family functions. Working over school breaks, trying to limit my holiday stints to at-most a seventy-two-hour flyby, where I could be back in **** before I felt like I had even left.

I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing with my life. Nothing stuck. I guessed I was going to wind up a History major, and with it, who knows what I’d do. I was nearly failing German 102, and losing all motivation for anything scholastic. I can count the classes I gave a shit about in college on one hand. Every semester I’d pore over the course catalog, seeing classes whose descriptions really interested me, that seemed like something that would finally hold my attention and make me show up.
It wasn’t until my senior year that I had a class before 11 AM, or on Fridays. My meager harvest of givable fucks existed between the hours of noon and six, Monday to Thursday. For me, classes were nearly all the same. Professors write some brief description drawing you in, thinking on the other side of their door lays a great font of knowledge so enthralling that one can’t help but be engrossed by the information to come — until two weeks in when you’re just reading more and more pages of what someone else wrote, so you can have two things to say about it in class, while ninety-percent of the students who occupy your class can’t muster so much as one original thought, usually choking out little more than a rephrasing of someone else’s comment. You would think that if someone dedicated their lives to one narrow subject, they’d at least be able to inject the slightest bit of personality into a fucking class. But in the bulk of cases, that simply didn’t happen. To make matters worse, people who study history make class time unbearable. Let me break down the archetypes.

The first, and most egregious offenders are the armchair historians. Usually white men lacking in social skills or awareness, these keepers of the Neckbeard Chronicles find it important to interrupt the lecture to mention tangentially-related events, in an attempt to impress the professor or fellow students with their tertiary knowledge — far too often related to military history. Be prepared for some “Well, actually” and for everything to somehow circle back to Nazi Germany in World War II. I’m serious — the Nazis found their way into every history class I took, even one about pre-modern Southeast Asia. Most likely seeing Hitler as a “misunderstood” figure, with many notable qualities left out of mainstream historical accounts, these insufferable validation-seekers will make you wince every time their hands go up, and can often be found holding the teacher up after class, trying to build rapport and be seen as a cut above the simple scholars who comprise the rest of the student body.

Next is another awareness-less individual, usually a class of twenty to thirty will have at least five, who madly scrawl down every word, and are so focused on keeping pace they don’t actually take in anything that’s being said, or develop any sort of sense as to what is or isn’t important. This breed of pupil is so prevalent that every professor begins to annotate their lectures, saying “and you don’t need to write this down” before the less-important sections. Never having had to think for themselves, the students inevitably begin to question everything: “Do we need to know this?”, “Can you repeat that?”, “I’m sorry what was that?”

Yo bitch, just pay attention and write down the key points and you’ll be fine. This isn’t stenography.

Lastly, you have the tactless, clueless student who stumbled in to take the class as an elective. Asking such questions as

“So...what exactly is going to be on the midterm?”, or

“So...is there going to be a study guide for the final?”

such people have zero regard for professors as anything more than glorified spoon-feeders, whose sole purpose is to “Here comes the airplane!” a puree of answers into their eagerly-awaiting mouths. As if a tenured educator will suddenly abandon their teaching methods — “Well Chad, no one’s ever asked me what the essay questions will be, so here you go. Everyone gets an A.”

What bothered me so much was how disinterested in learning these people were. They talked to hear themselves speak, or alternatively never paid attention, had nothing of value to add, and were more worried about their grades or chumming it up with a professor than actually gaining something that they might find useful outside the classroom.

I walked out of several history classes, and was asked to drop one after I involuntarily exclaimed “Jesus fucking Christ” when a kid managed to shoehorn in American Military Strategy during a conversation on the Moors’ conquest of Iberia in the eighth century. One professor had to rewrite his attendance policy after I skipped a third of his classes and simply did the required “make-up” assignments for each — a one page paper summarizing the day’s readings — something I could do at work and save myself a ninety-minute lecture a few times a month.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think I’m inherently better than these people or institutions — I was utterly disenfranchised by the whole thing. It just felt like a bigger version of High School, that also cost me five figures of student loan debt. The students just cared what grade they’d get, the professors seemed mostly uninvested in bringing their teaching style into the twenty-first century; everyone was punching some kind of clock but me. I just wanted to grow and expand my mind, while everyone else only cared about the bottom line.

I thought college was supposed to be an adventure, some great escape, but all I wanted to do was escape college. Whatever idealized expectation I had been sold wasn’t lining up — everyone was thinking about what was next, and I wanted to enjoy what was now. If **** hadn’t given me a generous financial aid package, I may have dropped out. My sophomore year was by far the most trying academically, where I felt the most out of place. The shiny timeshare pitch of my freshman year eroded as I moved out of the dorms, and into disillusionment.

I can’t tell you what year the Magna Carta was written, or what Pope Innocent III did, or recall even one-percent of all the things I learned in those classes. I do know far more about history than the average bear, and often flex my knowledge at bar trivia nights, but there was one thing I learned in class that made that stupid piece of $36,000 paper worth it. History 359, sophomore year, my professor John **** said:

“There are no right or wrong answers, only better and worse ones.”

Professor ****, if you ever hear this, thank you. You taught my first history class at ****, and my last. And somehow, in January of 2014, you remembered me from the Fall of 2012, a kid one hundred pounds heavier in a class of close to one-hundred fifty. I don’t know how; I think I said maybe six sentences to you that semester. Maybe you remembered my writing, who knows. You were the only kindred spirit I ever found in that faculty or that school, academically-speaking.

You became an educator because you loved learning. You didn’t care about the politics or the guidelines or tenure or any of that shit. I remember laughing during your office hours when I commented on how insufferable it must be to teach some species of student, and all you had to say in reply, as you peered down your bifocals in threw up your hands was, “It is what it is, ****.”

If it weren’t for you, I may not have stuck with that college thing. Your classes were the only time I ever summoned something greater for the sake of academics. To prove I could. Because you saw me for who I really was. I will never forget your exasperated sighs from our senior seminar, displeased with the safe, formulaic answers of students on Hemingway or Remarque, bluntly asking
“An original thought, please — how about you ****? I know you’re good for one.”