The years spent in college, especially in contrast with those before, are similar years in World War I described by Kern in The Culture of Time and Space: 1880 - 1918 as being in parentheses. The routines of students and their separation from their past make them like the soldiers of World War I.
As a student, I am at college with a lot of people who are very much like me. We are all caught in a routine and just trying to stay afloat, trying to stay alive. Sometimes I feel like I am just going through the motions—just going to classes and doing homework and weathering this storm—just fighting to survive. I get caught in a time flux: my hours, days and weeks run together into a blur. A soldier’s memories are confused as well because their time in the field was so regimented. There was a strict schedule which could not be departed from. The stringent schedule was meant to organize and give purpose to each hour of their day, but it instead stretched the soldier’s tour into a senseless bout of waiting, each day following like the one before it: monotony marked by gunfire.
Like a student’s time spent in class, hours of dull work leading up to a test. For soldiers, their time was spent preparing for battle or participating in one. College students spend their time studying for a test or taking one. Contributing to this anchor-less feeling was the bubble or parentheses of the time spent in college. Separated from the security of the past, old memories are smothered by the ever-pressing reality of the college work load and routine. Thoughts of family and friends were driven from soldier’s minds and replaced by the nightmarish gore of battle. A time before the violence did not seem to have ever existed.
Sometimes, I also feel a loss of personal identity. Too often I feel as though I do not have any control—that I am just going along with everyone else, thinking and doing all the same things that everyone else is thinking and doing. There are hundreds of people just like me, passing and failing, and life carries on. The soldiers of World War I were all the ‘same.’ They looked, dressed, communicated and worked alike, some living and some dying, but the war pressed on.
Adding to this shrinking, unimportant feeling is the gap between student and teacher. Teachers are distant and inaccessible. Generals in World War I remained in an office and strategized from afar, deciding the fate of the soldiers in the field, just as professors grade and teach from a distance.
There is also a similarity in the way that advances are made. In contrast to high school when success was black and white based on pass or fail, success in college can be achieved by roundabout means. You can drop classes, switch majors, take extra time, or depend on a curve. In World War I, instead of defending the front line at all costs, soldiers could cluster, retreat, reevaluate, and still win.
College life is warfare. Here we are fighting to survive, to win the war, to get that diploma. But like those soldiers, we sometimes lose sense of time and identity when caught in the routine—the parentheses of college life.
As a student, I am at college with a lot of people who are very much like me. We are all caught in a routine and just trying to stay afloat, trying to stay alive. Sometimes I feel like I am just going through the motions—just going to classes and doing homework and weathering this storm—just fighting to survive. I get caught in a time flux: my hours, days and weeks run together into a blur. A soldier’s memories are confused as well because their time in the field was so regimented. There was a strict schedule which could not be departed from. The stringent schedule was meant to organize and give purpose to each hour of their day, but it instead stretched the soldier’s tour into a senseless bout of waiting, each day following like the one before it: monotony marked by gunfire.
Like a student’s time spent in class, hours of dull work leading up to a test. For soldiers, their time was spent preparing for battle or participating in one. College students spend their time studying for a test or taking one. Contributing to this anchor-less feeling was the bubble or parentheses of the time spent in college. Separated from the security of the past, old memories are smothered by the ever-pressing reality of the college work load and routine. Thoughts of family and friends were driven from soldier’s minds and replaced by the nightmarish gore of battle. A time before the violence did not seem to have ever existed.
Sometimes, I also feel a loss of personal identity. Too often I feel as though I do not have any control—that I am just going along with everyone else, thinking and doing all the same things that everyone else is thinking and doing. There are hundreds of people just like me, passing and failing, and life carries on. The soldiers of World War I were all the ‘same.’ They looked, dressed, communicated and worked alike, some living and some dying, but the war pressed on.
Adding to this shrinking, unimportant feeling is the gap between student and teacher. Teachers are distant and inaccessible. Generals in World War I remained in an office and strategized from afar, deciding the fate of the soldiers in the field, just as professors grade and teach from a distance.
There is also a similarity in the way that advances are made. In contrast to high school when success was black and white based on pass or fail, success in college can be achieved by roundabout means. You can drop classes, switch majors, take extra time, or depend on a curve. In World War I, instead of defending the front line at all costs, soldiers could cluster, retreat, reevaluate, and still win.
College life is warfare. Here we are fighting to survive, to win the war, to get that diploma. But like those soldiers, we sometimes lose sense of time and identity when caught in the routine—the parentheses of college life.
Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space: 1880 - 1918. Cambridge, Mass. [u.a.: Harvard Univ., 2003. Print.
Most adults say that the years they spent in college were the best years of their life. So far I am having a lot of fun in college, but these past seven months have been the most difficult of my life. Like you mentioned, I struggle to get everything done that I need to, and to do well in school.
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