Who Made You the Teacher?

I am having a hard time adjusting back into American life. It's not as if this is the first time I've ever had to adjust to a new culture. Hell, I almost always feel like I'm out-of-touch (in some way) with the culture I'm immersed in, and I'm totally fine with that. This time, I'd say it's a bit more intense, though for reasons I can't say I fully understand.

Since coming back to Seattle, college no longer seems like the only site where learning takes place. All my life I've been pressured to succeed in school, to be in the best AP classes with the best teachers so I could get into the best college, and the assumption was that "the best" of whatever would help me to look more critically, and with more perspective, at the world around me. Studying from textbooks, trying to think of insightful things to say in class, and then attempting to expand these thoughts into an essay format that was also clear and concise was surely an intellectual challenge, and I've learned concepts that have completely changed the way I look at the world.

But, perhaps, nothing changed my world view more than the epiphanies I had while studying abroad, and nothing helped my writing more than contributing to the Stranger as a public intern...and after these incredible experiences of self-directed learning, the academic world just seems a bit irrelevant. Instead of coming up with my own ideas and epiphanies, I'm reading someone else's.

It's weird. It's not that I'm disinterested in school, it's just that I'm beginning to question it's absolute relevancy to my life.

To be completely honest, I sometimes looked down at college drop-outs, because I felt like the fight to make college education relevant to your life was a good fight, a noble fight, even if it was stretching it, and that even though learning takes place everywhere, it can be incredibly rewarding to sit in a class with someone who knows a shit ton and try to soak up all of his or her knowledge, and then soak up your classmate's knowledge, and then soak up your textbook's knowledge, and then combine the three. I felt like drop-outs often couldn't take the mental prowess that this demanded (or, perhaps, just found cash or intellectual fulfillment somewhere else).

Even bad classes, I'd previously felt, were not without their purpose because while I was seated in one of them, I could argue with the professor in my head, which can be stimulating, or I could raise my hand and say something contradictory, which can be equally stimulating once I got over my silly issues with self-image.

But this, this studying abroad...man. It's really a blessing and a curse, this thing, because it's completely changed how I look at college. Learning can happen anywhere! I can get intellectual fulfillment out of analyzing a bed of flowers for gods sake, much less a country! What do these teachers know about living with homophonic football players?! What the fuck can they teach me about how to deal with a classroom full of 6th graders who talk shit about you in a different language behind your back!?

Studying abroad is great, but it's made me realize I don't really need a classroom to be intellectually fulfilled, which is a scary idea for my momma and poppa because I am positive they'd flip a shit if I went and dropped out right now. Which I won't. I guess.