First Year University, and the Snowflakes are Experiencing Meltdowns

The university grounds are covered in slush -- left over from melt-downs of all the snowflakes in First Year. First Year students, so the journalists tell us, mark the beginning of the fall term by having a "difficult transition" from high school. They are "encountering obstacles" and must "manage stress not previously experienced". They must "make personal decisions not part of the high school landscape" and "do a lot of reading" with "unfamiliar words and complicated sentence and paragraph structure". (Yes. Really.) They will need help from an Academic Adviser, say the media advice-merchants, if not also therapy and medication. 

Baby-boomers were so lucky. For us, transition to University was liberation. We wouldn't have gone near an Academic Adviser. Our parents never set foot on campus until the day we graduated and got a degree.* Nobody told us we were going to have "obstacles and difficult transitions" and "stress not previously experienced" … so we didn't. What we experienced was adulthood. (And maybe a bit of S,D & R&R -- but that's a different topic ...)

And we already knew how to read. It started with "phonics" back then, and left most of us quite used to "complicated sentence and paragraph structure". That was what grade school used to teach -- not inclusion, diversity and victimhood lessons. 

Here's the paradox: it seems kids who have grown up in daycare since birth, spending little time at home or with parents, often not knowing grandparents who got lost in the step-family roundabout, have ended up without independence. They're without the emotional hardiness of past generations like their ancestors who made it through World Wars I and II, surviving bombing, poverty, immigration, and learning trades (or becoming scholars) to become financially independent. (Did today's kids got lost in a virtual digital video wilderness?)

Of course, every generation says how great the earlier fore-mothers and -fathers were ... but we do have to wonder what's going on when the media make "starting university" sound like transportation to an Australian outback prison camp in the 18th century. 

* SEE ALSO: https://satiricalscene.blogspot.com/2020/09/first-day-never-do-anything-by.html

First Day (Never Do Anything By Yourselfie)

First day of the term, and Mom drives you to the University. She wants to meet all your new teachers. She wants to make sure they all have her email address. She drives you up to the main door and says, "Now don't move 'til I get back, don't get lost while I park the car."

She manoeuvres around others parents' vehicles, and then dashes back waving a large bag: "You forgot you lunch!" You enter the building together, crowding in with other students, parents, grandparents, social workers, guardians and counsellors. 

"Is there a 'fridge where you can keep your medication?" Mom asks anxiously. 

First day of kindergarten? No: first day of university. 

Remember the old days when First Year students went to University by themselves? Finally free of adult supervision they could pilot their own educational boat and plot their route through adulthood.

They didn't need counselling because the buildings were big and there were other students they hadn't met before, and they had to find a room on a map and choose a desk to sit at, all without consulting a therapist. They arrived in their own second hand car, bought with money made in summer jobs. Or maybe they arrived by bus, and picked up its schedule because they'd be coming here every day -- by themselves. With parents here, they wouldn't have been seen dead.

Maybe they'd be living in Student Residence -- where Mom had not performed a hygiene-sweep ahead of time. Or maybe they'd still be living at home, but no one would tell them when to get up in the morning and what time their first class was; they just had to know that, as if by magic!

What has happened to independence and growing up? To being "able," instead of fetishizing "disability"? Such nostalgic concepts for those who started University in the 1970s and '80s. High school classmates melted into memory as we left our home river for the big ocean, like human salmon (me, I was entering a Biology program …) Salmon have a juvenile stage and adult stage in their life cycle, but it seems humans have evolved an endless recycling of juvenile stages. (An evolutionary decline?)

For us those first heady days of university were a rocking roll-over from grade school to independence, experienced against the throb of The Stones, Queen, Led Zeppelin. We picked up our course reading lists (we read books back then) and checked out the masses of cute guys who had materialized all around us. 

Today, Mom is here, asking, "where are your anxiety pills? Have you got your smartphone? Have you taken any selfies yet? Here … let me take one of me! Got one! Straight to YouTube! Here, let's take one for your ex-step-father who said he'd be here but of course isn't ..."

"Look at all these cute guys!" adds Mom, and she doesn't mean the 18 year olds; she means other parents. "There's one heading for the Starbucks across the street," she says. "You know what, I should get a double latte to celebrate -- this is such an important day for me! So I'll just pop into that Starbucks -- if you'll be okay on your own for a bit? Have a look around, but don't get lost. I'll be back soon -- text me if you need anything, okay?"