My mom and I have had a lot of conversations about "these kids today and their parents." This includes not only the parents around my age who, for example, ignore their children while the kids lick salt shakers in restaurants while looking over their shoulders with this desperate "please notice me!" look and then get angry at other customers when we tell the kid to cut it out, but also the weird relationships between my fellow college students and their parents.
In my marketing class last semester, my professor (who is a bit younger than my mom) made some comment about how she was convinced her own parents knew "absolutely nothing" when she was in college, and a bunch of students clamored about how they don't feel that way, how their parents are wise and give them a lot of useful advice, and how they talk to their parents on the phone all the time, etc. etc., which caused the approximately 6 people over the age of 30 in the room to look at each other like WTF is with these people?
Of course, this only bore out what our textbook said about Gen Y (born 1977-1994): "Unlike their parents or older siblings, Gen Y-ers tend to hold relatively traditional values and they believe in the value of fitting in over rebelling. Their acculturation agents stress teamwork - team teaching, team grading, collaborative sports, community service, service learning, and student juries... Five out of 10 echo boomers say they trust the government, and virtually all of them trust Mom and Dad."
I feel like I was pretty close to my parents when I was 18-22, but I simply cannot imagine wanting to talk to them on the phone all the time while I am in college. One of the real advantages of the pre-cell phone era, after all, was that your parents would call your dorm room and you could be conveniently "at the library studying" and unable to chat. And then you finally did get caught in your room, you could say that your stupid roommate forgot to leave you a message. (I am speaking theoretically, not from experience, of course.) I am basically appalled by how cell phones serve to keep college students so tied to their parents and that the students don't seem to mind this at all.
I admit, I would have performed better the first 3 semesters of college if my parents had been in constant communication with me, monitoring my behavior and priorities and giving me no-doubt excellent and hard-won advice (for instance, my dad could have warned me away from the 8:00 a.m. calculus 2 class that I got a C in after I stopped going in part because I fell in love by telling me about his experience with an 8:00 differential equations class that he failed after getting wrapped up with my mom). Oh, and intervened with professors who had such obviously unreasonable and unfair expectations of my attending foreign language lab hours and the like, and fought for me to get better grades. Instead, I made my own mistakes, learned the same lessons from my own experience, and generally got to function as a semi-independent adult for the first time in a pretty safe environment.
A running "offer" from my mom is that if things get too stressful for me and I'm just too overwhelmed and I need some help, she'd be happy to call the graduate programs I am applying to and tell them all the reasons they should accept me. This never fails to inspire me, because no matter what is facing me at any time, nothing is as horrible as the prospect of my mother calling a graduate school on my behalf. (In fact, I've said that it's too bad I don't know who my main competitors for these slots are or I could have her call pretending to be their mom. Muahahaha.) And while I am familiar with parents doing this for undergraduate programs, and even employers, I would like to think nobody would really do this for grad school. But then Tam (who is blogging pretty regularly these days, so you should check it out) pointed to this blog post from a person in charge of graduate admissions at her department. What are these people thinking? I mean, seriously?
Of course, it was great that my mom called me on Wednesday afternoon to find out how my differential equations test went that morning. It went very well actually - I was happy that when I sat down with the exam, each of the questions was exactly a kind of question that I was expecting to get based on the techniques that we had learned, with no surprises.
Now that that's past, I can refocus my attention on my marketing paper and my applications, which, oddly enough, are suddenly much less interesting to me than they were when they represented a distraction from doing algebraically interminable reduction of order or variation of parameters problems. Of course, I think I have a low-level version of the illness that had Robert dead asleep for the better part of 2 and a half days earlier this week, and I was lying in bed this morning really hungry but not even able to muster up interest in the idea of eating (basically unattainable but almost always desired) Belgian waffles with maple syrup, so how am I supposed to take an interest in other people's thoughts about organic food? Ah well, it'll be okay. I mean, oh god, no, Mom, you do not have to contact the people at the marketing conference to tell them to accept my submission late - I will get it done before the deadline! I will make it as good as I can!
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2 comments:
A "good" mom would have Fedexed you some Belgian waffles so you wouldn't have to make your own. Oh, you would have still had to get up to answer the door. Oh well.
Back when we were in college, the long distance plan on our phone was something like 30c for the first minute and 29c for each additional minute. At that price it just wasn't likely that either you OR your parents would choose to keep in touch for hours a week.
I sometimes ran into my mom on campus, of course, but I didn't particularly enjoy those times. ("Are you dirty or is your hair just wet?" was a typical mom question of the era. Um, wet, mom. Right. Wet.)
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