I just got back from seeing my counselor at Wuthering Heights Community College. I wanted to confirm just how many general education requirements I had left to go. Four, I figured, plus some one credit courses here and there, no big deal. The rest, though, appeared to be covered by my previous credits.
Not even close. I have been deluded from beginning to end.
If I want to be accepted at a state university I have to take 30 of the 39 general education requirements. The only items completely taken care of are nine units in Arts, Literature, Philosophy and Languages. Three classes, three credits apiece, that's all my four years at the University of Washington and my three semesters at Middle Tennessee State University get me. I have 85 total credits but all they count for are the Arts and Humanities units and the general electives because California has a very narrow definition of what counts towards lower division requirements and if I disagree that's tough.
For instance, my Introduction to English Studies, aka Critical Thinking and exactly the same course at both universities, doesn't count at State because at MTSU it was an upper division course. My two quarters of Composition at the UW don't count because they don't add up to three semester credits, only two. My SAT scores, which got me out of all the freshman English courses at MTSU, don't mean a thing in California. I don't get Life Credit towards a general education course, and I can't challenge them unless the professor agrees to let me. The counselor said I should forget about the previous work and start over.
"You'll never get the okay to challenge the basic lower division courses," he said. "No one ever does. Just take them."
You know what? I can't do it. I can't start from scratch, not after all that time and all those credits. I cannot throw away five years worth of university education because California doesn't think courses taken outside the state are good enough and won't make any allowances for circumstances. More importantly, I cannot waste the time and money and energy to sit through basic classes that I've already taken. I haven't got all the time in the world. I work full time, I have four nights a week to spare and I have to make special arrangements to use the car to do it. I cannot start at the beginning.
A university degree means so much to me. But it's not worth wading through the tedium and redundancy and utterly basic gruntwork just to get to the senior level courses. It's not. No matter how much I cry and watch my dream of graduating evaporate before my eyes I can't see sacrificing another seven years of night school for it. Because that's how long it will take me if I take all those courses at night, two at a time. And that's only to get to the second half of the degree work.
It's too high a price to pay. I guess getting a degree is more than I'm capable of, after all. I was wrong. You win, California.
Or do you? You don't want to give me any credit at all for having done the work elsewhere. You don't think my intelligence is worth looking beyond the lists of what I have and haven't taken. It isn't that I haven't done the work, it's that you don't believe it because I didn't take it at one of your schools. There's no room for the re-entry student in your world. In that case, you don't deserve my money, or my hard work, or my insights, or my unique perspective in the classroom. Who's the real loser here?
I'm thinking it isn't me after all.
The Index
Next Incarnation