The Class of 2011

It has been a long time since I graduated from high school. Or college for that matter. And as the month of May comes to a close, I find myself thinking about this year's graduates and the world they're going out to. When I graduated from high school I was so excited. The next step! College! Freedom! Standing on the football field as the sun set, I felt like finally my life was starting. I hated high school. Hated it so so much. And it was finally over. Hallelujah!

Then college started. Ugh. It was nearly as useless as high school. More books and tests and papers. So little learning.

I have always loved to learn. It's a trait that I hope to pass on to my kids because it's handy to have. I can spend all day surfing around Wikipedia, reading and learning. I love it. I love knowing things. I'm a fount of truly useless facts and knowledge. It's weird. But, ya know, that's just who I am. There were only a few classes in high school that I really felt like I was learning in. I was a fast student, a smart kid. I suppose I'm still smart. So I know I was more of a difficult child to challenge. But so often teachers just taught to a test. Taught to the lowest performing student. An unfortunate result of standardized testing and No Child Left Behind. I didn't get to be excited about class very often.

College was a lot more of the same. There were more exciting classes but once more I learned how much work I needed to do in the classes I was bored with and that was what I did. I made Chancellor's and Dean's lists a couple of times. But, it didn't really feel important enough to care about. Since I had no interest in going on to Graduate School.

When I graduated from college it was less excitement and more a sense of relief that FINALLY my schooling was over. Real life could finally begin.

Once out in the "real world" I was struck by one thing -- how much school does NOT prepare you. Unless you have your own place and deal with finances yourself, you don't really learn a lot about real life while in college. You don't learn about credit cards, balancing a budget, buying a home, setting up a retirement fund, how to invest your savings...the list goes on and on. All things that you will hopefully be doing shortly after graduating from school. But they don't teach you how to do it. And what do you do if your parents never did these things? Or didn't do these things well? Or you don't talk to your parents?

Bad habits can just carry on, generation after generation. No wonder we're still paying $4 or more a gallon for gas. We don't seem to desire any improvement for future generations. Our grandparents' generation should have started preparing for electric cars and wind power and green energy. But they didn't. Instead they paid 10 cents a gallon for gas and they drove gas-guzzlers everywhere for everything. And now we're all just sitting in shock thinking "Aww, crap."

I feel so bad for today's college graduates. This year's graduates have staggering college loan debts and there aren't jobs available for them. They have no way to pay back those loans. House prices are still outrageously low, in fact my house is worth so much less than I paid for it that it really pisses me off. But new graduates can't buy a home, because they can't get a job! They're fed all this hope and faith about how great life is going to be once they graduate from college and it's not going to be. It's going to be hard. Times are tough and this tunnel is long, dark and doesn't have a lot of light at the end. I just hope that things turn around for us all soon.

I think Oprah said it best "You are responsible for your life." So let's all go out and make our lives count for something. Teach our kids to do better than we have done and make a difference. A real difference. Let's change the world.