Our Director Writes:
Diary of a Mature Student, Semester Two, Week Five
Of course, there are the days when everything kind of meshes. Kind of.
They're just balanced out by the weeks that don't.
This week gone by, I met Hamilton. Hamilton is an associate student; he studies, on average, a course a year. He does this because he wants it to be this way.
He also does this because Hamilton is sixty-two years old.
And because of this, nobody will sit next to him in the lectures.
This annoys me more than I think I can put into words, or at least words more coherent than 'what the fuck'.
I'm fairly unique, it seems, in my attitude to age. I was lucky; I spent a lot of time with excellent grandparents as a child, and I always loved talking to the other people in the place they lived in, because they were always happy to talk. I thought this was normal at the time.
I was lucky, too, in starting this course, in that I didn't actually let my Mature status - your mileage may vary - actually particularly bother me, and because of that, it seems, it didn't bother anyone else. I just got on with it, and then some; the key, it seems, is enthusiasm, up until the point where people start looking at you with the eyes that say yes, fine, but when do you actually, y'know, stop?, and after that it becomes a matter of generating enough goodwill to go on being enthusiastic without annoying anyone unduly.
So I got talking to Hamilton at the beginning of last week. He's happy enough; his children are at university themselves, and he was coming up to retirement age, so he though what the hey and decided to go back for some learnin' and see what the whole university shebang is about.
So now, he sits at the far right of the auditorium, on the front row - the mature student's row of choice, our hearing isn't so good, you know - and there's another mature student of about fifty or so nearby, but other than that, there's four or five empty seats next to him and one or two behind him, unless latecomers fill them up.
I get the whole perspective-of-youth thing. Mature students remind young students that the future exists, and, yes, you have to grow up some time, and you'll get wrinkles, it'll get colder and things generally slow down. When I began the course, I was worried about being the Spectre at the Feast; "hey, young people, do a degree, it's great! Look at me! I did a degree, and went out and got a successful job - no, wait... I found true love - no, that's not right either... I found my purpose in life - ah, screw it." Now I just tell them, in the politest possible terms, to enjoy being young. I don't mention anything else.
I may have mentioned this before, but in my first year, first time round, I was possibly the worst student I can imagine. Oh, I did lots of reading, and passed some courses, but there's nothing so terrifying as the apparent illusion of freedom (although walling us up into seven-story tower blocks containing sixty to seventy other students isn't exactly freedom) but I sucked like a dyson at the whole academic thing. C'est la vie.
Now, I care. I care with the passion of a convert turned fanatic; it feels like zeal a lot of the time. But I'm also the most manly Cassandra you'll ever meet; I hide my meaning in polite words and avoid making what I say sound like injunctions like the plague, but, as I've said before and I'll still be saying in three years time to the young people of today, do it right right now and it becomes so much easier.
Yeah, it's easy to stay in bed.
Yeah, you can miss two or three lectures and not break a sweat.
Yes, the courses in the first year don't matter to your final grade.
Yes, this is probably because they expect you to fuck up, ever so slightly.
... Where was I?
Anyway, if I can, I'm going to make a point of sitting next to the other mature students next week. Not because we should band together, in some sort of agéd pack of experienced hyenas, watching the rest of the naíve, young crowd piss and moan about having to attend lectures.
Just because if I don't do it, I don't think anybody else will. And that would sadden me more than you could know.
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