Leaving For College

You know it has been coming for a year. Yet you never really recognize the day will come. One month. One week. One day. Then she is saying goodbye to the dog and you wait and hear her sniffs that blend with your own. Then you have the drive up to Michigan that is like a family vacation. You want it be that way. You push it from your mind even as you enter the university and make your way to her dorm. Now you are unloading her belongings in the cart. You are the cheery dad doing the physical stuff you do best. Your wife is already arranging her room and you step back and everyone is in their roles one last time.

Then there is a walk around campus. At twilight you look up at her dorm and pick out her window and you know that is where she will look at life now. That window is her new home and you will not be there with her. But there is still time. There is the dinner where the seafood is not quite up to Chicago standards. You joke around with her as you always do and then in the hotel room you watch Ace Ventura and you both laugh laying together on the bed. You always had the same quirky sense of humor.

But now it is morning. You go do down and try and eat something but your appetite is gone. A trip to the Walmart for last minute items. You see other parents looking like zombies with their kids. No one wants to go to this final wake for parenthood. But then you go back to the dorm and unload the bags and now...now there is nothing left to do or say. You cannot talk and hide behind your sunglasses. She hugs your wife and then she hugs you twice. And you murmur I love you. Something you never said enough. And now you are walking down the hallway. If you can just make it to the stairs you will be good.

And then you do and you walk to the car that is now minus one person. And you start the engine and pull out and you leave your daughter behind. And now you just cry and cry because your heart is broken and there is nothing you can do. Your daughter  has just left for college. 

Adjunct Hell

Years ago during my writing career I dipped in and out of teaching like a drunk going back to the same run down bar. I was the aspiring writer coming into the purview of the full time professors. I usually got the crappy classes nobody wanted at eight AM and it was usually first year comp. I taught at a very prestigious expensive private school. Two of them in fact. When they had faculty meetings the room was full of adjuncts. In the middle sat the anointed full time professors, all five of them. The other twenty five teachers were adjuncts. This was at a school that charged 40K a year in tuition.

So I learned quickly there were two worlds. The hotdog money world of the adjuncts (2500-3500) a class and the tenured full time 70k+ world of the professors who generally didn't speak to the adjuncts. My brother is a full fledged professor and he told me many times that the adjuncts came and went so why get to know them. So you show up at a class with no fanfare at all. You were hired months before and then you never saw anyone again. You teach your guts out for a class or two and then you get in your car and drive home. That's it.

No collegian conversations. No going out with your colleagues over lunch. No dinners with the University President. You are on the outside, you are the lone ranger, the interloper, in fact you don't exist. The students call you professor  but they do not know the dirty secret .You are not really employed, you are a contract player who will probably not return.Hey what are you teaching next semester?  You demure. You don't know. If enrollment is down you wont be teaching anything. And then you just disappear. That's what happened with me. You just don't get another class.

So you get the word that your class was taken by a full time professor. You try and get another class but suddenly it is like you never taught at all. You are unemployed. So you do what any self respecting writer would do...you sit down and write a book. And never look back.

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

Archiving Your LIife

Went down to the University the other day and dropped off ten computers and my son for a weekend at college. I got to stay in a dorm room and the Archives of the University added ten old computers to my earlier manuscripts. The Archivist looked at the coffee stained behemoths and shook his head. "What kind of operating system are these?" I told him they were Windows...maybe the first one.

And then I shipped off the son and walked around the University. Ok. Seven novels later and I am back where I started. So this is what I did after I graduated. I wrote novels that ended up back at the University in ancient computers. And what does it mean that there is up in the library a room with all my manuscripts and ten old computers that in theory will give up my efforts from the last fifteen years. And will give some scholar a glimpse of my life. I don't know.

I go to the English building and it is locked. Of course. Summer. Duh. I stare in the window and look for the guy who sat in those classes. So I just walk around campus aimlessly like that Undergraduate did so many years before. That night I go get a drink then come back to my dorm room. Laying in the bunk bed I can see the campus from my window and the library. In the other part of the dorm my son sleeps.

Everything is truly a circle.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

Rethinking College for the Recession Generation

I was talking to a friend of mine who has kids in college and he lamented that he would be two hundred thousand dollars in debt when it was all done. The college students in question mooned around the graduation party for another friend soon to partake in the great middle class migration started after WWII with the GI Bill allowing people for the first time to partake in higher education. Up until that FDR moment there was college for the rich and the few who could actually work their way through college at a time when someone could actually pay as they went.

But now there are loans galore and middle class people follow the script of revved up highshool GPAs to revved up ACT and SAT scores and the eventual departure to private state Big Ten or the coveted Ivy League prize. Then they return four years later to look for a job. In the worst economy since the Great Depression. With incredible debt. We have heard of young women turning to prostitution to pay for these  debts now. Such is the desperation of a job market that marginalizes even the best and brightest. Maybe it's time to rethink the auto return of going to college.

Now if you are going to college like days of old to get a liberal arts education and become that limited of all specialists "the well rounded man" So be it. Take your debt like a man or a woman and pursue your journey. But ninety nine percent of the middle class take the utilitarian view that college will get you a job. And that is why the debt and the four years are worth it. A leg up on the rest of the population. There is still a leg up but the problem is there a lot more people with legs now. In fact the whole world is growing legs.  

The difference is the Global job market. College graduates are now competing globally for the more highly technical jobs that a twenty first century economy demands. If you are not specializing and at the top of your class then you will be in the great unwashed of college graduate moving back home. As the New York Times put it "college graduates now have to up their game." Which brings me back to this point, college is maybe not for everyone anymore.

The weighing of debt and time and getting a job is a brutal equation. And if you are going to be a salesman or you have that burning entrepreneurial idea, then maybe the four year hiatus is a waste of time. The fact is the mediocre middleclass jobs for mediocre college students don't exist anymore. These jobs are being replaced by computers or eliminated. Or there is one for every thousand applicants What used to be vast fertile ground for middle management white collar jobs has now gone vertical. Specialization and cream of the crop applicants take the jobs corporate America has to offer. For the rest it is a straight commission landscape or entry level sweatshops.

So this paradyme of middle class kids to college for a job might have reached it's level of obsolescence. The brutal truth is if you are going to take on that debt you better have a game plan. Or go for an education and call it at that and be comfortable you will be in debt for many many years.  Educated and broke is not without precedent.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man kindle or paperback First chapter

Our Mediocre Middle Class Colleges

If you think our public school system is mediocre then a new book out called Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses certainly puts the nail in the coffin of American education. Americans have been told ever since the GI Bill came around after WWII and sent all those middle class kids to college for the first time that if you went to college then you had better opportunity or to to put it more directly, you could get a job. Now if you watch Waiting For Superman, the documentary, the message is that our public schools are not good and they are not good because our teachers are not good. But now there is the thought that maybe our colleges aren't so good or that the students going there aren't so motivated or equipped.

Makes sense. You could also make a case that ever since the school of business appeared on college campuses vocational training pushed out Liberal Arts and students have been the lesser for it. In Academically Adrift the case is made that students are able to get good grades in college and learn very little. That in fact they are finding the current crop of graduates unable to articulate their thoughts or possess a critical intelligence, synthesize information into a thesis or write a coherent sentence. In other words it would seem the mediocrity of our middle class learning institutions extends all the way through college.

It really started with the whole go to college to get a job mentality. The fact is that is not even true anymore as the current unemployment rate of 17 percent among college graduates bitterly proves the point. The fact is our graduates are victims of a mediocre culture that does not value critical thinking nor does it see the need. I myself tumbled out of a State College with a Masters then sat down to read F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side Of Paradise and I had to keep a notebook because there were so many words I didn't know. This is not a heavy duty novel  by any stretch, but there I was basically unable to decipher a literary novel.

Of course the obvious remedy is to move Liberal Arts back to the front of college curriculums. The people who lead the country and who make the money and who are in the power band are able to think, formulate a thesis, and they do have a critical intelligence and are able to understand literature. The people who go to college to get a job should re evaluate if college is for them. Coming out with a hundred thousand dollars on your head is high price to pay for something that is no longer guaranteed. 

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off April 26th

How I flunked Comp 101

Bitter to say it but I flunked comp 101 in college. I was that freshman who had no clue about anything and was barely hanging on at the State College I barely got into. I was struggling through my first semester of about sixteen hours and figured I could  hang my hat on English. In high school I had been told that I had a hankering toward writing and wrote a few short stories a few teachers thought were mildly impressive. Besides,I came from a family of readers and our house was jammed with books. Comp 101 I figured would be where I made my mark.

But I didn't count on the TA (Teachers Assistant) with the Art Garfunkel hair who was teaching the class. He slouched in with his glasses and Afro and gave us our first assignment. Write about our summer vacation. A knock down. I had been out East so I wrote all about the beach and Baltimore and handed in the assignment. The man with the high hair handed it back with a big fat D and red scrawl: You did not follow the assignment. I went up to him and asked where I had not violated the assignment and he said that I was supposed to write an essay with conflict. My story did not have the proper conflict in the first third of the first page. So I got a D.

Then followed a series of writing assignments. Each time I wrote to what I thought the assignment was. Write about your best friend. Your worst experience. Write about college. Write about a political event. Write about a girlfriend or a boyfriend. Each time I got back my paper there was either a D or an F. The red scrawl pointed out that I did not follow the instructions. My final grade for the semester was a D. I would have to take the course over in summer school.

Summer school arrived and I went to my course makeup. It was a hot day in June and the old creaky English building was empty and smelled of moldy wood. I waited in a small conference room. A man in a bow tie came in and introduced himself. He asked me a few questions about my composition grade then asked me to write a story on anything I wanted. Then he left. A friend of mine had recently gotten married so I wrote about that for the next half hour while summer played out the window.

Forty five minutes later the teacher with the bow tie returned and read my story. He frowned, then looked up at me. Why are you here? Because I got a D in composition I told him. He looked back at my story. You have your own sense of style and you know how to tell a story. He shrugged. I'll give you an A. You passed. I looked at him. That's it? He stood up. Do you want more?

Thats how I passed Comp 101.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man will blast off in April

The Novels You Should Write

There are always those novels you should write. They come creeping in while you are busy writing all those novels that come fully plotted and seem to be almost preordained. They are stronger plot wise and usually have a hook that intrigued you originally and so you take those and a year later you have a book somewhat close to what you imagined. Give or take a few  thousand words

But what haunts you are the novels you feel should be written. These are more around the Franzen type of books that will inform the world on the human condition and give you some sort of immortality beyond a google algorithm. These are the novels that are certainly more difficult to write because there is less of a road map and more of yourself is on the line. You are always in the novels somewhere but in the novels that you should write you are front and center because for it to be any good you have to take risks.

And those risks are that after years of toil no one will be interested in your opus on what it means to be alive in the year 2010 or beyond. This then is the fork in the road and many novelist don't take this road because it is fraught with hazards; the biggest one is that it is damn difficult and the second one being that publishers are generally not burning down your door for the novel of evocation of character or what's it all about. Whats the book about? Well its about everything, its about our time. Uh huh.

So you write the books that while are not a safe bet as there are no safe bets in fiction at least you can sum it up to an agent or editor and have them get it. And while you write these books you tell yourself that one day you will write that novel that will put it all together. One day...

www.billhazelgrove.com
Rocket Man will be out in January