Off the Top of My Head Online (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} otmh) wrote,@ 2006-07-07 17:26:00 |
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July 4, 2006 - Twenty Years Ago (Part II: "Orientation")
I'm not sure what I was expecting when I got to the College of the Atlantic that summer, the summer between my seventh- and eighth-grade years. I didn't have much in the way of background. I'd never been to summer camp or anything too terribly like it, and I was savvy enough even at that age to know that the camp-themed movies I'd seen (OK, I admit it, I'd seen Meatballs) were unlikely to be accurate reflections of reality.
The campus of the College of the Atlantic is pretty. I'll say that right up front and without reservation, it's a very attractive little school. And it is little - the school's website claims for it an undergrad population of 278, right now, with a whopping seven grad students, and 40 instructors, 15 of them part-time. The campus is right on the water, at the edge of Frenchman Bay, and it's a lovely postage-stamp-sized place with a handful of handsome buildings, rolling green lawns, and all that kind of thing. It's almost idyllic, and in the summer, when those 200-odd students weren't around, it even felt kind of spacious despite being compact.
It's kind of a strange school, though. It only has one major - "Human Ecology" by name - and you can guess just from the name what the place's particular bent is. Mind you, I'm not exactly a right-winger myself, and I certainly wasn't in 1986, but all the same, the COA experience was a bit more, er, touchy-feely than I was expecting. This would manifest itself in a couple of different ways over the course of the program, which I'll get back to presently.
At any rate, orientation went about like you'd expect - welcome-to-the-program speeches from the instructors, rah-rah-we're-gonna-have-such-fun cheerleading from the advisors, and so on. We were broken up into two groups, boys and girls, and directed to our lodgings. There were two tiny dorms on campus, though like everything else about COA they were boutiquey, more like overgrown private houses than what someone who went to a big college would think of as a dormitory. They had little kitchens that we were informed we could use, with supervisory permission, if we had anything to prepare, which of course none of us did.
After that, the parents cleared out and the students trooped back up the hill to the dining room for a dinner-slash-mixer intended to break the ice in this group of a hundred or so strangers and get the ball rolling socially.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that I'm not much of a mixer. I don't hobnob well and I've never been comfortable putting myself forward to strangers. At any event where everyone has to stand up and introduce himself, I'll be the one with the barely inaudible mumble who sits down about two seconds before it would really have been socially optimal to do so. Fortunately, they didn't do anything like that at the first-night dinner - that would come the next day, when we were split up into our various class groups. Still, I wouldn't call that evening's dinner a total success as far as I was concerned, for a couple of reasons.
First, the food was terrible. Now that I've been around longer and seen more of the world, that wouldn't surprise me. At a tiny liberal arts college with a solitary major named "Human Ecology", what do you expect, barbecue ribs? At the time, though, it was a bit of a shock what they considered food at this place. I confess I don't really remember what most of it was now - just that there was seaweed involved and I considered none of it edible apart from the rolls, which were quite good. My persecuted memory insists there wasn't even butter, but I don't think that can be right.
Second, my school system at the time didn't have an in-school lunch program; everybody went home for lunch. I had no experience with the concept of eating in a dining hall with a bunch of other students. Truth to tell, in those days I'd have found it daunting enough even with the kids from my own school, people I sort of knew. In a room full of strangers I went into full-on disappearance mode - table in the corner, as unobtrusive as possible while I picked over my whatever-it-was and decided I wasn't that hungry.
It wasn't until afterward, when those of us who were finished with our dinners adjourned to a deck-type arrangement outside, that I ended up actually talking to someone. It was that tenuous time in any social gathering when the sub-groups are just about to crystallize, and those who haven't found one yet are in serious danger of being shut out entirely - isolated for the rest of the occasion. I've been there; the best you can do after that point is to get friendly with one of the established groups, and that can work, but you'll never actually be part of that group. A program like a two-week special school camp doesn't allow enough time for that.
Fortunately, this time it didn't happen to me. Today I can't remember exactly what happened; I suspect it was just an organic process, the two other guys who were in danger of having the same thing happening to them gravitating in my direction. However it started, I ended up off to one side talking with a couple of guys who were roommates down at the end of the hall on the second floor of the boys' dorm. Their names were John Trussell and Kelly White, and they were to be pretty much my only friends for the next two weeks.
I had two roommates of my own, in a triple room toward the middle of the second floor, but we seemed to have determined by some kind of silent mutual consent that the other two and I had nothing much to say to each other. I spent most of the first couple days, apart from actual class time, down the hall in their room, watching with them in a sort of detached horror as the tribal structure of the boys' dorm gelled.
If I had expected anything of the experience, I figured it would be pretty low-key, socially speaking. After all, these were all students who, like me, had been selected because of their performance on a test no seventh-grader really had any business taking. We weren't going to be paddling canoes and making leather wallets here, we were going to be studying literature and classic films, or advanced math, or what have you. I wasn't expecting a cadre of ruthless toughs to band together and go on a rampage, bent on, in the finest schlock-movie style, making everybody else's life miserable... but that's pretty much exactly what happened.
I'm not sure what I was expecting when I got to the College of the Atlantic that summer, the summer between my seventh- and eighth-grade years. I didn't have much in the way of background. I'd never been to summer camp or anything too terribly like it, and I was savvy enough even at that age to know that the camp-themed movies I'd seen (OK, I admit it, I'd seen Meatballs) were unlikely to be accurate reflections of reality.
The campus of the College of the Atlantic is pretty. I'll say that right up front and without reservation, it's a very attractive little school. And it is little - the school's website claims for it an undergrad population of 278, right now, with a whopping seven grad students, and 40 instructors, 15 of them part-time. The campus is right on the water, at the edge of Frenchman Bay, and it's a lovely postage-stamp-sized place with a handful of handsome buildings, rolling green lawns, and all that kind of thing. It's almost idyllic, and in the summer, when those 200-odd students weren't around, it even felt kind of spacious despite being compact.
It's kind of a strange school, though. It only has one major - "Human Ecology" by name - and you can guess just from the name what the place's particular bent is. Mind you, I'm not exactly a right-winger myself, and I certainly wasn't in 1986, but all the same, the COA experience was a bit more, er, touchy-feely than I was expecting. This would manifest itself in a couple of different ways over the course of the program, which I'll get back to presently.
At any rate, orientation went about like you'd expect - welcome-to-the-program speeches from the instructors, rah-rah-we're-gonna-have-such-fun cheerleading from the advisors, and so on. We were broken up into two groups, boys and girls, and directed to our lodgings. There were two tiny dorms on campus, though like everything else about COA they were boutiquey, more like overgrown private houses than what someone who went to a big college would think of as a dormitory. They had little kitchens that we were informed we could use, with supervisory permission, if we had anything to prepare, which of course none of us did.
After that, the parents cleared out and the students trooped back up the hill to the dining room for a dinner-slash-mixer intended to break the ice in this group of a hundred or so strangers and get the ball rolling socially.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that I'm not much of a mixer. I don't hobnob well and I've never been comfortable putting myself forward to strangers. At any event where everyone has to stand up and introduce himself, I'll be the one with the barely inaudible mumble who sits down about two seconds before it would really have been socially optimal to do so. Fortunately, they didn't do anything like that at the first-night dinner - that would come the next day, when we were split up into our various class groups. Still, I wouldn't call that evening's dinner a total success as far as I was concerned, for a couple of reasons.
First, the food was terrible. Now that I've been around longer and seen more of the world, that wouldn't surprise me. At a tiny liberal arts college with a solitary major named "Human Ecology", what do you expect, barbecue ribs? At the time, though, it was a bit of a shock what they considered food at this place. I confess I don't really remember what most of it was now - just that there was seaweed involved and I considered none of it edible apart from the rolls, which were quite good. My persecuted memory insists there wasn't even butter, but I don't think that can be right.
Second, my school system at the time didn't have an in-school lunch program; everybody went home for lunch. I had no experience with the concept of eating in a dining hall with a bunch of other students. Truth to tell, in those days I'd have found it daunting enough even with the kids from my own school, people I sort of knew. In a room full of strangers I went into full-on disappearance mode - table in the corner, as unobtrusive as possible while I picked over my whatever-it-was and decided I wasn't that hungry.
It wasn't until afterward, when those of us who were finished with our dinners adjourned to a deck-type arrangement outside, that I ended up actually talking to someone. It was that tenuous time in any social gathering when the sub-groups are just about to crystallize, and those who haven't found one yet are in serious danger of being shut out entirely - isolated for the rest of the occasion. I've been there; the best you can do after that point is to get friendly with one of the established groups, and that can work, but you'll never actually be part of that group. A program like a two-week special school camp doesn't allow enough time for that.
Fortunately, this time it didn't happen to me. Today I can't remember exactly what happened; I suspect it was just an organic process, the two other guys who were in danger of having the same thing happening to them gravitating in my direction. However it started, I ended up off to one side talking with a couple of guys who were roommates down at the end of the hall on the second floor of the boys' dorm. Their names were John Trussell and Kelly White, and they were to be pretty much my only friends for the next two weeks.
I had two roommates of my own, in a triple room toward the middle of the second floor, but we seemed to have determined by some kind of silent mutual consent that the other two and I had nothing much to say to each other. I spent most of the first couple days, apart from actual class time, down the hall in their room, watching with them in a sort of detached horror as the tribal structure of the boys' dorm gelled.
If I had expected anything of the experience, I figured it would be pretty low-key, socially speaking. After all, these were all students who, like me, had been selected because of their performance on a test no seventh-grader really had any business taking. We weren't going to be paddling canoes and making leather wallets here, we were going to be studying literature and classic films, or advanced math, or what have you. I wasn't expecting a cadre of ruthless toughs to band together and go on a rampage, bent on, in the finest schlock-movie style, making everybody else's life miserable... but that's pretty much exactly what happened.
