Every year around this time, from about the age of 7 until I was 21, older people asked me the same question: “So,” they’d say with a genial chuckle, “are you ready to go back to school?”
I haven’t heard that question in about 39 years, but this week I heard it again for the first time in a long, long while. I have gone back to school — I am perhaps the world’s oldest graduate student, getting my Master’s of Divinity at Princeton Theological Seminary — and as September nears, I am feeling the old back-to-school itch to buy new pens, binders, and a giant Trapper Keeper notebook. I am also getting to hear some of the old questions.
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“So, are you ready to go back to school?” someone asked me this week. It wasn’t someone older, of course — there isn’t anyone older — but one of my contemporaries who is curious about my life as a student. Most of my friends have children who are either in, or have just finished, their undergraduate education, and from what I’ve gathered, if you ask someone who depends on you for their college tuition and general livelihood anything about the current academic experience, they will roll their eyes and sigh loudly and defensively accuse you of being insufficiently supportive.
But that doesn’t mean they’re not curious, which is why my friends who are parents direct their inquiries to me. They know I’ll listen to their questions without accusing them of being instruments of a systemically evil late-stage capitalistic patriarchy. And then demand money.
The answer to the “Am I ready for back-to-school” question is an emphatic Yes! Unlike most of my academic career (circa 1972-1987), I am here because I want to be. There are things I cannot wait to read and conversations with classmates and teachers I am anticipating with real enthusiasm. One of the pleasures of going back to school at my age is that I have finally figured out how to be a good student. It turns out, it’s pretty simple: just do the reading.
I know, I know. Obvious, right? Perhaps for some. But for most of my school days, I only read just enough of the assigned texts to bluff convincingly in class. I skimmed the first few paragraphs, scanned the basic material, spoke up in class just enough (and with enough careful wording) to appear on top of the subject. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to read Anna Karenina or The Waning of the Middle Ages. It was just that my schedule was so packed with sitting around with my friends, talking and drinking that it was nearly impossible to carve out a few hours for reading and studying.
One of my most successful techniques was to open up a book at random, in five or six places, and look around for interesting quotations or bits of dialogue and then knit them all into a longer, comprehensive essay that really and truly read as if I had read the entire work. Great art is like that, I discovered. If it’s really good, you can pretty much get away with saying anything about it. And it’s important to note that my grades in college were really good. I graduated cum laude. In other words, I was a very good “student.” But I was a lousy student.
It’s different now, 40 years later. I’m not distracted by the noisy and alluring possibilities of college life in your 20s. After a glass or two of wine, I’m falling asleep at the table. One slice of pizza after 9 p.m., and I toss and turn until dawn, sweaty and uncomfortable with heartburn. Sitting quietly for a few hours reading through a stack of books feels almost like a vacation, like I’m playing hooky from a real job.
And that’s the main difference between my student life today and what it was 40 years ago. Back then, I was impatient for my life to begin. Now I know exactly what a real job is, and I prefer the one I have now, with a stack of books, a backpack, and a new binder every September.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.