A little over three years ago, I had an idea.
My friend Alan and I were talking on the phone one day, only a few months after I saw my first book published. Writing a book was something I’d always wanted to accomplish, but it was also the last and least likely thing on my list of things to do — like make some records (check), tour the world (check), become a published writer (check), start my own record label (check), and maybe work on a movie (insanely enough, check). So when that book finally came to fruition, it seemed like a signal. I needed to derail my career trajectory entirely.
“I think I want to be a teacher,” I said, and Alan agreed that teaching was something that intrigued him too. I wanted to teach English; he considered teaching math. But neither of us had college degrees, and for that matter, I never even bothered to finish high school.
His was an innocent suggestion: “Wouldn’t it be crazy if we enrolled in college and just did it?”
“It would!” I replied, and like all good crazy people, I enrolled in college the following week. Alan never actually made it to the admissions office.
I don’t totally blame him: Going to college in your mid-30s is embarrassing. It’s embarrassing when professors assume that you’re too young to remember Ronald Reagan or The Great Space Coaster. It’s embarrassing when you’re ten years older than your instructor. It’s embarrassing when your classmate tells you that the degree they’re working on will help them get a job in the music industry and you tell them that the degree you’re working on will help you get the fuck out of the music industry. It’s embarrassing to have to explain to a 19-year-old young woman, who is objectively cute, that you are almost as old as her father and, either way, a happily gay man. It’s embarrassing when the twenty-second adult that you meet at a grown-up social function keeps having to clarify: “You mean grad school, right?” It’s still embarrassing when the twenty-third adult you meet asks the same thing.
But the last three years taught me a lot. For one, the whole “college is bullshit” rant of the late-’80s hardcore and punk scene that informed so much of my worldview was mostly based on a description of high school — which is still, to some extent, kind of bullshit. In college, I personally witnessed the transformation of young men and women who came in with binary questions about the world and left with an understanding that it’s more complicated than that. I became a catalyst of personal change myself when one of my classmates — after admitting he thought he hated gay people before we met — told me he’d realized that his homophobia was no better than the racism he felt as a black man. I watched young people questioning, for the first time, all of the political, religious, and social assumptions they learned from their parents and their cultures, but best of all, I watched them evolve.
I evolved too, in a way I didn’t expect: After spending more than a hundred hours working with high school students as part of the Education–based degree I was pursuing, it occurred to me that the literal scores of professors who couldn’t understand why I wanted to teach in secondary education kind of had a point. My interest was more in the ideological components of teaching language and literacy; it was not so much about being in the trenches of the New York City public school system. I wanted to explore these ideas with other adults, perhaps as a college instructor, but certainly within academia. I began to see college as a place that had become not only not “bullshit,” but an environment in which the change I sought to effect as a punk kid might actually be realized.
A little over three years ago, I had an idea that came to its natural end this week when I graduated from college with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Adolescent Education. I will, at long last, begin grad school in the fall — much to the forestalled pleasure of adults at grown-up social functions everywhere.
Considering my penchant for self-sabotage, this is probably a milestone.
