💾 Archived View for quasivoid.net › gemlog › 2021-04-17-higher-education.gmi captured on 2021-12-06 at 14:29:53. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
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Today was one of many days where I woke up, felt drained of energy, and never gained any energy during the day. I went back and forth between playing with my computer and napping. Time flew by doing nothing rather than dragging on.
I am feeling pretty terrible about how my first semester of college is going. I'd taken college classes out of necessity during high school, so I understand the system, but I am just as incompatible with higher education as I was with high school, the only difference is that in high school I had enough lenience to wiggle out the other end despite barely scraping by. Currently, I am only still in one out of the four classes I had started the semester with.
The first class I dropped without feeling much of anything. The class turned out to be not what I had signed up for. Dropping it had no impact on my plans.
The second class I had dropped was my computer science class. That was the most disappointing experience I ever had. I was looking forward to having the opportunity to engage my primary field of interest for several years in an academic environment, instead I got a professor who lies by omission, is unclear about assignment requirements, and makes light of his awful reviews on RateMyProfessor, presumably to make those who also thought poorly of him feel like they were in the wrong.
The third class I dropped was my English composition class. I was doing well, and I liked the professor, but after completing one of the major essays while misunderstanding the instructions threw me off the rails and I was unable to keep up with the assignments after that.
My remaining class is trigonometry, a class I had already failed when I had to take it at the college during high school. I am scraping by. Now that I don't have any other classes to worry about, I want to focus on trying to bring my grade up. If I fail trig a second time I don't know what I would do.
At this point, I have very little hope in my ability to continue higher education, which deeply worries me because the fields of work which interest me are gated behind a diploma regardless of my actual skill level in the subject. I'm not sure where to go from here. I have been aware of my incompatibility with the education system for as long as I have been enveloped in it, and spent most of my Junior year of high school convinced I would become an electrician post-graduation, a prospect which disappointed many of my instructors who felt that I had much greater "potential".
After this semester I am definitely waiting until in person classes open again before I try again.
I spent some time talking to an old friend from high school today. He noticed that I'm into road cycling, he's really into motorbiking. We united on common ground in loving all two wheeled machines and dreading being behind the wheel of a car.
I have only driven a handful of times and have not yet gotten a license. I hated it because I felt disconnected from the road, and cut off from my sensory organs. Combined with having to operate an extraordinarly heavy and clumsy machine, I wanted nothing to do with this. Road bikes, on the other hand, are twitchy, small, and you can feel every crack in the road.
He said that it sounded like I'd love motorcycling, too. I'd been thinking about motorcycles before, but this suggestion got me thinking about the differences between motorbikes and bicyles, other than the obvious difference of one being fueled by gasoline and the other being fueld by protein and carbohydrates.
Something I really appreciate about bicyles is that the entire machine is extremely simple. You don't need to spend long with a bicycle to understand how all of it's components work. The rear derailleaur may be the most complicated part, but by simply pushing it in with your hand and observing how the mechanism moves, you can pretty much figure out the entire mechanism in one go.
The construction of the machine is straightforward, too. You can almost completely strip down and rebuild a bicycle without using any special tools, only a torque driver and a screwdriver. It's only when you want to take apart wheels and the bottom brack where anything specific is required.
On the other hand, motorbikes require a great deal of study to get a good understanding of, and rebuilding them is a whole lot more work. Granted, I have no experience with this. But while a bicycle wears its drivetrain on its chainstay, a motorbike is a whole lot more intimidating.
This isn't putting down motorcycles at all. I think they are pretty sick, and see one in my future. This is just a note about how much I like the obvious mechanics of bicycles.