Time for one nasty analogy: Imagine you’ve chosen your very own destination. Maybe it’s the Great Alps, Mecca, the Amazon Rainforest, or maybe even the Moon, Mercury, Saturn and the stars beyond. Whatever destination you choose, in order to start your journey, you must board a bus – but not just any bus, one of the Great Busses; vehicles that can be so massive as to hold small cities within themselves. Your first bus was a rather small one, relatively speaking, with not even 1,000 people filling the seats by your fourth and final year aboard. Yet, that’s precisely what makes the ride all the more intimate with your bus mates, kindly attendants and sage-like storytellers.
But then comes the time for you to cross the sea, to carry on through your journey you board a behemoth of a boat, easily twenty times the size and population of your meager bus, but something’s not quite right. Its dull grey-blue paint is rusty and faded, nothing like the glamorous greens and golds of your little bus before. The boat is so large and the people so plentiful that they split themselves into groups, and even then, your shipmates are distant from each other. The crew wear their uniforms sloppily – coats unbuttoned and stitches long frayed – as they work less as a team, and more on each of their individual tasks in a mutually shared plane of existence.
The captain can rarely be seen, but when he is spotted on the balcony of the captain’s quarters, he seems like he’s from a different world entirely, shiny shoes and a three-piece suit, all too-bright and all too-clean. Not exactly the cruise ship you were expecting.
This is more or less how I feel about my own transition from high school to college. I’m definitely on a bigger and more powerful vehicle to get to where I want to be in life, but the people operating it – being mainly the professors – seem considerably dispassionate about the boat that’s keeping them afloat.
Classmates are timid and afraid, usually only speaking and bonding when forced to or through shared complaints of subpar instruction. In high school there was a sort of love for the place that is almost completely absent in college as of this moment.
Is this normal, for a college to miss? Is this right, for a college to lack?
Maybe I’m in the minority here – maybe I’m one of the few who’ve had better high school environments than college environments.
Well, maybe you could tell me your thoughts by tweeting at the official Schoolcraft Connection Twitter account, @SchoolcraftNews, where we can talk about where we’ve come from and to where we might be sailing.