JOURNAL EXCERPT: April 27, Thurs. 1978 8:10 PM

"I mailed the forms for readmission to [Texas] Tech [University] today. I hope they don't take too long in answering. Didn't get much writing done. Half a page. Mom interrupted me. Wanted me to take her to get a new state inspection sticker on her car. Then we had to go get Jennifer from track practice, then back over to get her car. It was almost 5 o'clock by the time we got home. I ate. Then, since I was being bomarded with little hints, like, 'You haven't mowed the front yard, Pat,' I mowed the front yard. Then I listened to some records (Nilsson and the Beatles). Then I ran. Another exciting and fulfilling day."

MANHOOD REDO: The above excerpt is kind of all over the place, so I'm going to focus on the first couple sentences about reapplying to Tech since I've thought a lot about school and masculinity. It took me a long time to think of myself as an academic, as a learner. Some people saw it before I did. The priest I wrote about earlier who was a close friend of the family told my mother he thought I would do something with my mind. There wasn't much indication of that through high school and on into the first couple years of college; I was the sort of student who when he had a book report due would read the first and last chapters and make up details as filler, hoping that the English teacher either hadn't read the book or had forgotten most of what he or she had read. While I wasn't one of the "bad boys" who sat in the back of the room disrupting the class, I wasn't exactly what you would call a model student. In English, when we were supposed to write a poem, I plagarized lyrics from a Beatles' song, "Doctor Robert," which one of the other students recognized. I worried he would turn me in.

I wrote in an earlier blog about my relationship with school but what I didn't get into were economic class issues and masculinity. My understanding is that the above descriptions would fairly accurately represent my father's relationship with school. He has told me he wasn't a serious student. He became an accountant almost by happenchance. On his walk to a factory job every morning he went by a two year business school and eventually thought he might as well try it, so he became a student and scraped by in the grade department, managing to graduate with a C average. I can't help but think that the poverty he experienced growing up in significant ways shaped his relationship with the educational system and my relationship with it. While he went on to become an excellent accountant in charge of accounting departments and provided his family with a comfortable middle class life, I'm certain I unknowingly harbored some historical residue tied to the lower economic position he occupied earlier in his life. If nothing else, neither he nor my mother could provide much in the way of concrete advice about or insight into college since neither of them had attended a four year institution of higher education. They definitely did everything they could to support my attending college, but I can't help but wonder if that connection with a working class background and the traditional masculine stereotypes that accompany it, almost sabotaged their efforts.

It wasn't until I reapplied to Tech after dropping out for two years following my sophomore year that my attitudes began to change. I've always found it ironic that I taught for eight years at George Washington University, the most expensive private university in the country, and not only would attending it as an undergraduate have been well beyond my economic means, they never would have let me in with my grades.