Embracing the liminal space of post-grad life: Appreciating what’s passed and preparing for whatever’s next
Freshman year, a professor introduced me to the idea of liminality—the sense of being between things. Such an idea felt pervasive, and for good reason. I was between home and school, high school and college, being a teenager and being an adult. At the end of college, it’s inevitable that liminality shows up again. When as a freshman I found it moderately horrifying—the nostalgic and nervous-about-the-unknown elements of my personality taking over—I look at the next liminal period of my life with hope. The endless possibility suggested by the liminal becomes encouraging rather than depressing. We won’t stop hearing about how bright our futures are and I want to suggest that those words of wisdom aren’t as full of shit as we’d like to think.
It’s with this in mind that I’ve come up with three ideals for our futures that I don’t think apply just to me. We cannot predict what’s on its way, but I hope these ideals get at a certain sense of taking control as best we can of what’s to come.
First of these is that we all stay in touch with the people and communities we care about. Most certainly this includes our classmates from the class of 2012, but it also reaches to those others who’ve been important to us in our four years. We can’t keep up with everyone—nor do we want to—but we’ve also built some of the strongest relationships of our lives here, and we’d be remiss if we let them fall apart once we leave.
Second is that we not become as dependent on caffeine as we were in college. My regimen of a few black coffees or Iced Turtles a day (shout out to the good people of Whispers for perfecting the Turtle mix) is neither good for my heart nor for my sleep schedule. It might be a good thing to get into some real world habits.
Most important is that we all contribute to our future communities as much as we’ve contributed to ours at Wash. U. We’ve got future doctors, lawyers, musicians, analysts, et cetera in our midst and we are the people who will help make Wash. U’s name the one its PR folks keep trying to craft. If we appreciate the creativity and intellect that we’ve developed over the last four years, we can direct it into some amazing future successes—it’s through our actions and our triumphs that we will make our own names and bring about some incredible, positive changes to our world.
One final note: Our time here is not condensable into .gif files. No matter how “true” an image might ring, there’s something much more true in our own experiences, in the stories we tell. We’ll laugh at the picture, but we’ll also forget it in half-a-second. The memories we made here will last us much longer than that. While the essences of these memories are important, so are the memories themselves. Don’t always boil them down. No contestant from “Toddlers and Tiaras” is ever going to represent your memory as well as you can.
Stepping down from my soapbox, I wish everyone the best of luck in the future. Ours is a class full of talented people in so many different fields; I’m excited to see where you all go, and even more excited to pull out my “I knew him/her when…” speeches, if and when I need them. We’re at one end of a tremendous liminal space, seniors. Get excited for whatever’s on the other side.
Be sure to look up the homeschooling laws in your state each state gets to deidce their education laws, so what works for you in Ohio is gonna change once you move to Georgia or for your buddy in Michigan. Local homeschool support groups are pretty good for this; they know the state laws well, and have insight as to how the local law enforcement views them; you may live in a place where homeschooling is well-accepted and pretty lenient, or your local superintendent may be on a power trip to see how much authority s/he thinks s/he has. These groups also keep up to date with changes in the laws, which is helpful. Try Googling your nearest metro city with the words “homeschool support” to find a few near you. The next thing to realize is that there’s a whole spectrum of what’s called homeschool. Some people sign up with an online version of public school; that’s really technically not “homeschool,” since you’re counted as public school student and you’re assigned a teacher, a strict schedule, and predetermined workload as determined by the school district, etc. The dirty little secret here is that the district gets to keep the federal funds for you, as you’re a public school student this way. (Quite obviously, your school district will like this option best. Often when one queries the school as to the options available for “homeschool,” the school administrators will smile sweetly and mention just such an arrangement, conveniently omitting the rest of your options. This “lie by omission” quietly implies that this is the one and only way “homeschooling is done.” There’s a quite a debate in the homeschooling community about whether or not this constitutes an effort by the educational bureaucracy to redefine the meaning of homeschool, and what effect that would have on legislation and regulation of more traditional homeschool. But I digress.)Other people may choose to buy materials from companies and enroll with online schools, but they’re independent of the school districts, and they don’t owe anyone a darned thing their test scores (if any; few homeschoolers in the traditional sense are obligated to take state standardized tests) are their own business, as is the pace, order or depth at which they choose to go through the material. Other people make up their own curriculum, based on their own personal criteria. Some states want you to keep a portfolio of material to prove you’re doing something there at home, other states want you to submit your curriculum for the year for approval, others may require testing that could send you back to public or private school if you fall below a particular percentile just in case. Again, depends on the state. Still other people endorse what they call unschooling, and they throw out all books and tests altogether and simply follow what interests them. (See the writings of John Holt, or Google unschooling for more on that theory of education.) A good book for anyone over 12 years old is “The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education,” by Grace Llewellyn. Here’s an excerpt: Did your guidance counselor ever tell you to consider quitting school? That you have other choices, quite beyond lifelong hamburger flipping or inner-city crack dealing? That legally you can find a way out of school, that once you’re out you’ll learn and grow better, faster, and more naturally than you ever did in school, that there are zillions of alternatives, that you can quit school and still go to A Good College and even have a Real Life in the Suburbs if you so desire? Just in case your counselor never told you these things, I’m going to. That’s what this book is for. Even if you don’t hold with what the author has to say, the point of view she has is dramatically different and can be a great springboard to help you get in touch with what you believe school and learning should be like. The book also outlines a very nice reference for curriculum, as well as chapters about dealing with your school, convincing your parents, and getting a social life. It’s meant to be a very usable book. As with many things, there’s a wide spectrum of “unschoolers,” as well. Many of them have a certain set of concepts they want their kids to get and don’t care HOW they get the information, while others take a much more laid-back approach and allow the student to set the list of concepts themselves or not set one at all. All of these people will still consider themselves “unschoolers.”