Don’t mind me; I’m just here for the fuses.
Class is gonna hurt. Don’t mind me, I’m just here for the fuses.
I was expecting different. Not better, this is great. But different. Fersch is an odd little guy who carries lots of paper and plastic bags, and doesn’t like to explain his grading system. He’s also one of the best forensic psychologists in the world. I have to admit, that after reading all of the books he’s written that have crossed my path, I expected… grimmer. One expects a man who’s spent his lifetime staring into the abyss of human nature to be a little more grizzled, a little more battle-scarred. This man has spent decades examining the beginnings of the roads to hell; he’s got more hands-on look what makes people do bad things than most people dream exists.
He isn’t grizzled. He’s actually very affable, and covers up the steel with a lot of friendly advice about what to expect and what not to expect in his classroom. There’s not a lot of accommodation, which is fine, that’s not what I’m here for.
He’s a law professor and a lawyer. He is also a psych Ph.d.
I am going it from the other side; clinical psych with an eye towards policy, not towards counseling psychology. I will get licensed for it, but I don’t expect it to be my lifeline. I don’t know what will be.
I have no idea where i’m headed, beyond my determination to turn my evening education into acceptance at a good grad school. I do know that it’s not the same future as the 60 fresh-faced, gorgeous pre-law harvard college kids I’m in with. Oh, my god, it’s amazing how much beauty a background of money can provide. I am old, and I am coarse, and my hands show a lifetime of work. My hope is not new and my skin is not soft and my eyes are flinty and hard.
But I have to recognise that I have a something they don’t, for all that they are brilliant and clear. They may be the best and the brightest, but unlike them, I’ve been the places that we’re studying. I’ve looked on the places where the road to hell begins from a close-up, in-person perspective, and taken my feet off it, and they haven’t had to for the most part. They are mostly privileged, mostly perfect, and precious to society and to the world and yes, even to me, for their innocence and intelligence and potential.
I have no innocence to offer. My potential is the kind that has teeth. It’s the kind that has power. My potential is all about a mind already active, stripping the material we’re given apart to rob the wires and build mental machinery that has nothing to do with the exams. I’ve got my own mental mecha already in progress, so I’m not here for drafting practice. I’ll do it, but it’s not all that I’m here for. I’m already attacking our classwork with a screwdriver held in my teeth and my spanners in an arm-holster, yanking out gears with ecstatic abandon.
I’m not here for the reason they’re here. They’re getting prepared for the world, for grad school, learning how to think. I know how to think. I’m here to get raw material and guidance on it. I don’t have to be told about a lot of the issues we’re studying because I’ve been there in a way that they haven’t, and I’ve already spent most of my life considering what makes good people become bad people, and what makes people do bad things or good things. How to forgive them for it, move on, reconcile myself to a world where people are sometimes damaged or broken or outright dangerous. It’s a big, bad place out there, and these dangerous people are everywhere.
Like I said, I’m just here for the fuses. I’m polishing, I’m here to have something to grind my hard edge against. In some ways, I’m at a serious disadvantage, because I’m thrown in with kids whom I have to allow to be kids, allow to do what they’re here to do. Keep my mouth shut and not monopolise the class, make sure that they know we extension school kids give a damn about their futures even as we’re trying to build our own. It’s hard. I have to sit down and do the same work, with a different use for it in my educational process. That’s a disadvantage, because the extension students are by far in the minority.
At the same time, when it comes to the material itself, we have a depth of perception because our lenses were forged a little hotter and have been out in that big bad world. It’s vicious out there, and they haven’t seen it yet.
I don’t have the innocence of youth. I have the radical purification of the saved. It’s a little different and it’s not scared by the fact that the course work is hard and the material is triggering for me. It’s painful to watch all these interviews with people who’ve murdered others. It’s painful to read their accounts. It’s hard for me to see children who were hurt, hurting others. But it’s mine, the pain is mine, and I will leach every last bitter drop of wisdom I can from it while we’re in class. I will take everything off the vehicle that can be taken; they will leave with an eye-widening perspective into the dark underworld of human nature and some practice in the whiteclad, gloved-hands question of what to do with it. I will leave with my arms full of bits of law process, specs of various parts of human behaviour, books of studies on how others behave and learn and deal with these things, and what’s expected in future shop classes. My tools will be sharpened from writing for a fierce critic. It appears that Dr. Fersch is a very demanding critic, and that’s a very good thing. I don’t want an easy A. I want the hardest A I can get, because I need it for later. I want the skills.
I play for keeps.
So Im excited about it, even as I recognise that the class I’m taking isn’t the class they’re taking. I’m a lot more than interested. It’s the same undergrad credit, but mine isn’t part of the same college experience. Mine is part of the Educate the Adult project, and so mine is a lot more hardcore.
I guess that’s what was different. The kids don’t look hungry. They don’t thirst to get their hands on the books. You can tell the extension students because we’ve already registered, bought them, and read them, cover to cover. They don’t know who the prof is. They don’t know how much value to place on his experience in the real world, or any real world experience. The older few, the ones from the extension school, I can tell them by their hungry look. Their grit. It’s got to be interesting to teach people who have that.
We don’t whine over tenths of a grade point. We grind our knives down sharper, and get ready for the next round. I’m proud of them. I’m proud of us, old and quirky and out of place though we may be. We’re not just the future; we’re the mental mechanics of the present, reporting for duty.
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