Watch Out For Inflation

Notes From a University Student 11

Pieter Breugel The Tower of Babel

Let me explain the meaning of the American word “course,” because that’s confusing. Not everything related to education here can be easily translated into Dutch. To American standards I’m studying at a university, but to Dutch standards that’s a rather big word.

Those Elusive Urals

Notes From a University Student 10

Sir Philip Sidney

Right now I’m doing a course about the development of the English novel, from the Renaissance to halfway the eighteenth century. The professor is a nice guy and a specialist in the eighteenth century. Every now and then it’s embarrassingly apparent that he doesn’t know much about the Renaissance, but once we had arrived in the eighteenth century it started to be fun.

Magner Come Lowdy

Notes From a University Student 7

I now have an American bachelor’s degree in English. Big whoop. I told them they could mail it to my house. The thing isn’t worth more than a ninth-grade report card. I’m so pissed off! My Dutch library degree was supposedly worthless,  so I had to get my American bachelor’s degree. It’s laughably easy, so I get the highest grades, and then they’re surprised!

Mary Had a Little Lamb

Notes From a University Student  6

Illustration Kate Greenaway

One of the first days on my job as librarian at that small high school, I was sitting behind my desk, sorting catalog cards – yes, cards in 1995!—and some students were sitting at a table near me, showing each other pictures. Then one girl who couldn’t have been more than fifteen asked me if I wanted to see pictures of her son. I started to laugh, and then I remembered that America has a problem with teen pregnancies. I quickly turned it into a cough. She wasn’t joking.

3=3, Or Does It?

Notes From a University Student 1

The registrar of the local university gets to determine what my degree is worth. And he has determined that he cannot recognize my degree because  my library school did not have “university” in the name; it has the word “academie” in the name, and he knows exactly what that means, because he’s watched Police Academy.