The NFL is on track to
have another 50-arrests-year for five years in a row. One more 50- arrest year
and they will have to change their name to the Notorious Felons League.
Reminiscing about my
Winnetka, Illinois education. School all through (Nee) New Trier East was hard. If it got close to easy, they made it harder. Some teachers were
card-carrying sadists.
Being the genius I was as
a youth, I thought it was cool to rebel against their authority. Thrown in was
the fact that I thought my status as a National record-setting decathlete would
take care of any such trivial problems as my horrific class ranking. Bottom third.
A torn hamstring in
football ended that misconception, so I went to college in that most rarefied
land of academia, Long Beach. Long Beach's main contribution to society is the Swap Meet.
Spent my first six months
at Long Beach City and I won’t even get to how bad the classes were. It was not
due to bad teachers, there were students taking classes who could barely read. The
teachers had to adjust accordingly.
The next year at Long
Beach State was only a little bit better. For the most part, the students were
surfers who could read, but were too stoned to read. It
is almost with conviction I can say that I doubt I studied more than an hour a
week.
Besides, I was living in
a dorm as one of the few males at the Brooks Institute of Fashion Design and
Modeling. It might as well have been the Brooks Institute of Wayward Hot Women
With Rich-Daddy Issues Who Like Blonde-haired Decathletes.
Studying was not a
priority.
But I would take English
classes and there would be people in the class who could not write a paper.
This is not to say they didn’t know how to properly footnote, or use the proper
Intro, A, B, C, conclusion format. They could not write a paper. They wrote
their papers like a kid writing to Santa Claus.
The next year, things
improved dramatically when I got to UCSB. UCSB at the end was challenging but more in
terms of doing creative research projects and networking. By now I was studying
maybe three to four hours a week.
Make no mistake, I am wildly proud of my UCSB diploma. It is a great school, and it has rubbed off on my daughter. Now she has it on her list. My education in Winnetka made it possible to make my UCSB experience so wonderful.
For example, take the
paper I wrote my senior year utilizing the teachings of communications guru,
Marshall McCluhan, who invented the theory of “The Global Village.” The title of my
thesis was:
“How Advances In Personal
Computer’s Ability to Share Digital Data Will Create a Vast Communication
Network Called The Internet.”
Just kidding.
Took a creative writing
class and sat next to a funny, smart and popular volleyball player in my
fraternity from Newport Beach. (He would go on to be a real estate tycoon) When the teacher assigned us F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” which I had read three times, he asked;
“Why would they write a book about
that crappy Robert Redford movie?”
