The Adventure of Learning in College

It's like I'm right back in Ms (Was it Miss or Mrs?  One really good thing about women's lib is 'Ms,' though as I recall, we used it all the time back then when we didn't know a woman teacher's marriage status. And who the hell ever wanted to think about a woman teacher's marriage status? That meant you had to picture her husband, and then of course you saw the two of them going at it like rabbits, and that would certainly bring your breakfast back up) Tichy's class.  There were gametes and there were those zygote things and there was something called a blastula, and I'm pretty sure there were more.  There were the diagrams where the one cell became two, then four, then eight, then it got complicated and boring again.

We had to dissect things, a worm i am sure, and possibly a frog, though thank god I don't remember the latter.  We got to look through microscopes but mostly at dried up old crap that looked like, well, dried up old crap.  I owned my own microscope at some point.  I had tropical fish and I could look at the water from the tank under the microscope and pretty damn cool, even cooler when you shook a few crystals of salt on it and all the little beasties went kablooie.  Tropical fish, a whole other story there, but one that i suspect is not very interesting to someone who didn't have them.

College Zoology was a big disappointment to me.  How animals work is a potentially fascinating topic, but it seems like mostly we just looked at more dried up old crap through microscopes.

College as a whole was a big disappointment.  I didn't like high school because of all the authority the teachers had over us, and I didn't like that whole busywork thing that was always going on.  I somehow thought in college that we would be lounging around neoclassical buildings, if not wearing actual togas, then metaphorical ones, exchanging ideas inquiring freely into the nature of the universe.

It was nothing like that.  Nobody wanted to talk about the mysteries of the universe.  I was in a dorm with a bunch of guys who were only interested in peering into the windows of the girls' dorm across the lawn, and I have to admit I was among them.  My fancy Bausch and Lomb  binoculars which I had bought to augment my telescope in scanning the heavens was pressed into use to glimpse a girl in her underwear.  And the busywork there was just more of it. 

Still, it was a nice place to be when the sixties arrived.