My Freshman Y- zzzzzz...

Wait - did you click on the right link? Maybe punch in the URL a little too hastily and got the wrong page? Weird... why is there a book review on here?! Because it's Sunday night and I'm mixing things the hell up! But pay attention to what follows - it might save you.

It's been a few weeks since I finished a book. It got to the point where I was juggling 3 at a time to keep myself entertained, but I just finished one of them up tonight. It's called My Freshman Year* with some extended subtitle I'm not looking up... by Rebekah Nathan. Let's cut to the chase: 2 out of 5 stars.

It's a true book written by an anthropologist at NAU after she spends a year enrolled there as a freshman. Her motivation for this was to understand students and the American college culture a little better, as she admittedly didn't lately. In reading the premise, I thought this had great potential, but it really fell flat for me. The real problem was that it really didn't tell me anything I didn't already know from firsthand experience. This feeling was conveyed by several of the Amazon reviews I read prior to finishing it up, and not all of them from people like me with not-so-distant memories of college.

Want some mind-benders? Behold:
-Lots of underage students still drink at college.
-Various degrees of cheating go on all the time.
-Having class on Friday is frowned upon.
-Some students are so rushed that they sleep in class.
-Despite university initiatives to encourage (ethnic/international) diversity, many students hang out with others just like them.
-Students learn to tailor their opinions so that it pleases the teacher even if it's not what they genuinely believe or assert.

No.... shit. Again, maybe it's obvious to me, but lots of other people think she could've found the same results way faster by conducting direct interviews instead of adopting this "undercover" method of immersion. I do credit her with designing a research experiment that allowed her to naturally experience the field in question, but it also brings on questions of ethics in hiding her identity as a faculty member.

What really made it hurt is that it just draaaaaagged in so many places. I honestly had to force myself to sit down and push thru even the last 4 pages of her concluding chapter. It shouldn't be that hard. It also got really annoying that all of her footnotes were pushed to a section in the back. That meant flipping back and forth, sometimes just to find the title of an old study referenced. Well, I said fuck that, and just quit reading them. And really... anyone that throws out "reciprocity" as much as her needs a firm elbow in the sternum.

Really, the only thing that saved this review from 1 star (and me from binge-drinking away the pain) was that this book illustrated how wide the average is in the "average college student." I never thought of myself as the average, but I was much closer than I thought (with regard to her sampling). Many of us learn the shortcuts (geographically, academically, etc.), lose the urge to party all the time, and turn to doing enough work to get by. But we don't look at teachers as the enemy as she hints. I had some great teachers, and this ignorant message of hers only makes me want to e-mail them, catch up, and thank them for being as great as they were.

Meh - could've been a great revelation to future students, current students, parents, anyone... but it just turned out kinda ignorant and sneaky. Approach with caution.