Study Buddies!!

Maybe the BEST part of heading back to school is knowing my bestie is in my class

I was one of those kids who loved going back to school. My obsession with school (and, later, office) supplies has not faded despite trolling the stationery aisles during decades-worth of end-of-summer sales. Oh, what could be better than the smell of new textbooks just waiting for the bright colours of fresh felt pens and highlighters, the smooth, unblemished reams of three-hole punched paper (on the first day of class, nobody had made any mistakes), the bright pink erasers and nifty dividers for shiny binders… Clean, new sneakers, a haircut, the delight of seeing familiar faces, and the intrigue associated with the new kid in class…

As I’m thinking about this, the school supply ritual was always similar - find the best deals at Woolworths or K-mart and organize and reorganize them in a new backpack the night before Day 1…

But, in truth, in more years than not, I was the new kid in class. By the time I hit grade ten (Fort McMurray Composite High School in northern Alberta), I was walking into my tenth school. My undergrad degree was cobbled together over a period of ten years, at six universities, in three provinces. I’ll spare you the details of that messy education of my youth for now.

This year (I’m now in my early 60s - good lord, how did THAT happen??), I’m once again heading back to school. But, oh - how times have changed. For one thing, this is a hybrid remote learning degree with a couple of optional in-person bonding weekends. Back when I was a kid, computers hadn’t been invented and distance learning was a convoluted process involving lots of stamps, fat envelopes, and endless delays. Calculators were a bit of an anomaly and telephones were still attached by wires to walls. The internet? What now? Zoom? Email? Even fax machines, photocopiers, and electric typewriters had yet to make an appearance when I first got excited about fresh pencils at the end of each summer.

Even though I won’t be sitting next to anyone in class each week, one of the most familiar faces in the virtual classroom will be none other than my daughter, D.

She’s pretty brilliant and was actually accepted into the program last year. She deferred and then proceeded to hound me to also apply so we could be in the same cohort. This is beyond amazingly cool that we still get along well enough that we would want to be in this semi-stressful situation side by side (screen by screen).

Already we are shooting text messages back and forth as we jump into our reading list. We’ve both started listening to Abelard and Heloise: The Letters and Other Writings. (If you missed my initial reaction, check out yesterday’s newsletter:

D. is not far behind me in her listening and has already taught me a new acronym: AITA. How have I never heard of this? Just in case I am not the only one who hasn’t encountered this, it stands for Am I The Asshole? It’s a Reddit thing - and, according to my visit to Reddit (where I haven’t spent any time since… oh, a dozen or more years ago…) I found this handy decoder key:

In your top level comment be sure to include one abbreviation for your judgment, i.e.

YTA = You're the Asshole

YWBTA = You Would Be the Asshole

NTA = Not the Asshole

YWNBTA = You Would Not be the Asshole

ESH = Everyone Sucks here

NAH = No Assholes here

INFO = Not Enough Info

So… the party who feels wronged posts what happened to them and then the readers chime in with their opinions re. whether or not said party was actually in the right (NTA) or clearly in the wrong (YTA) etc… A quick perusal of the threads in the subreddit (are threads what Reddit conversations are called?) had me rolling my eyes and laughing despite myself. [If you want to do your own research, here you go.]

What, you may ask, has any of this got to do with the 12th-century letters of a love-lorn Abelard? If Abelard had wanted to discuss and debate his behaviour (shenanigans with a student) today - perhaps looking for absolution in the courts of Reddit - he may well have posted a summary of his situation there.

And that is where I will leave this for now. I feel like I should read the whole collection of letters and arguments before I condemn anyone and offer up my YTA or NTA verdict… which, I suppose means I need to end with a resounding INFO.