Sixteen years of school at an end

By Marcos Moreno

Maybe it's the fact that I'm graduating in a matter of weeks, but for some reason I can't keep from reflecting on my many years of schooling.

It was a long and winding road for me -- for all of us, really. I guess it's been about 16 years; 18 if you count preschool and kindergarten. In a way, education is the only kind of life I've ever known.

What I remember most was how orderly school taught me to act.

When you think about it, the early years, elementary school and such, were all about lining up and learning how to be neat and proper. Our teachers were obsessed with lining kids up. Everywhere you looked, there were kids in single-file lines. We had lines for attendance and lines for when we left for recess. There were lunch lines, bathroom lines and lines when we played games -- jump rope, tether ball and hopscotch, just to name a few.

Learning how to write was the same thing. Everything we wrote had to fit neatly between two blue lines. Not only that, but we had to use cursive handwriting -- which to me now seems so obsolete, but that's beside the point.

Every week the class would practice a new letter from the alphabet. And by practice, I mean we would spend what seemed like hours writing that letter over and over again. This is how we learned to write between the lines.

I remember once I had to stay in at recess because a paragraph I wrote was a little too sloppy for my teacher's liking. She made me rewrite the whole thing. I'm still bitter about it.

I remember on our blacktop there was a line that divided the older kids' playground from the younger kids' playground.

I don't know why the faculty felt the need to differentiate between the two playgrounds. Maybe they just wanted the yard to seem bigger.

The truth is, when I became old enough to play in the older kids' playground, I realized that there wasn't much of a difference between the two. It was all just one big playground, but with a line through the middle. Realizing this gave me a false sense of accomplishment.

Everything about elementary education was linear: If you do this, then this will happen.

Things went on like that for a long time, pretty much until the end of high school.

But when I got to college, no one was telling me what to do anymore. If I got into something, it was because I wanted to do it. It was a refreshing change. The students are free to join clubs and take whatever classes they want, or just go hang out at the pool for hours on end.

College is a pretty sweet deal. I mean sure, we have required courses, but for the most part the path you choose is up to you. And yeah, that might cause people to make a lot of mistakes. But if people didn't make mistakes, they would never learn how not to make them.

So I guess the biggest difference between grades K through 6 and college is that there are no lines to follow. I have had no objection to that. Lines may make things very simple and very direct, but they also make life very boring.

I honestly don't know what will happen when I graduate in June. Yes, that scares me - but it's also kind of exciting.

Where I go after college is completely in my hands. I'm sure I'll end up â?¦ somewhere. Wherever it is, I hope it's sunny.

Marcos Moreno is a senior English major.