How I Spent My College Years

The Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science at the University of North Texas is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.  If you click through to that article, you’ll see a lot of talk about academic excellence, expected Nobel Prizes for graduates, all the wonderful achievements that TAMSters have been able to make.

You won’t see anything about me, or the other students like me.  I’m one of the students that TAMS would rather never existed. But I’m still glad it was there.

There are two types of students who end up in programs like TAMS and TIP.  The first type is the student who works hard to achieve academically.  This type of student knows how to study from an early age, is familiar with doing homework, works diligently on all assignments.  They strive to achieve those goals that parents dream of when their babies are born, to become doctors and lawyers and scientists.

The second type is the one like me.  I never had to work for any of this.  I never learned how to study. Assignments were always put off until the last minute and completed in a great rush the day before they were due. I liked learning new things, but I enjoyed that knowledge for its own sake.  I never wanted to work to be the best in my class, to have the most amazing science fair project.  I received a lot of praise and preening and showing off from my parents when I was little, and so when I started falling a bit behind those students who worked so hard, it was disappointing…at first.  Then I got over it.  I didn’t care enough to take that first place back.  For me, taking the tests that got me into places like TIP and TAMS was sort of a curiosity, a bit of, “Gee, I wonder just how good I can do on this one?”

What I don’t think TAMS realizes when they try to brush us under the rug is how much of a good thing the program was to kids like me. Those busy-bee students would have done well in any environment.  Left alone in their high schools, they would have continued to study and work, graduating tops in their classes and heading off to college just like their predecessors.  The students like me, though, are the ones who used to make people shake their heads and think, “But he had such a bright future!” Had I stayed in my high school, I would have continued down a path I had already found, following the kids who smoked and did drugs, settling for small-town excitement, continuing to flounder in a teenage world that I didn’t even want to embrace.

TAMS gave me the opportunity to see another option, another slice of life.  I got to spend time, more time than the three weeks a year that TIP allowed, in an environment where I wasn’t unique.  I met others who played with computers and played with music because they were fun, not just to win competitions or fulfill an elective.  I met others who read the same books I did.  I met other smart, intelligent college students who still lived life for fun, who took care of both their intellectual side and their rebellious side.  Some of these were fellow TAMSters, but most were not, and I would never have encountered them and been able to join them had I stayed at home.

I didn’t excel academically at TAMS, but I got a chance to jumpstart my life in a way that was good for me, to skip a few years of social adolescence that held no benefit for me, even if it wasn’t the way that my parents or the administrators envisioned.  I was in the fourth class at TAMS, and more than half my class, like me, failed to earn a diploma from the program.  You won’t hear that statistic from TAMS. They consider us a failure, an embarrassment. But I don’t have to be a good little statistic to say I benefited from the program, and that I am still grateful, 20+ years later, for the opportunity it gave me.

Published by solinox

I am a Wiccan priestess, a libertarian mother of triplets plus three, a wife and homeschooling mom to blind and autistic children, a fiber artist, and a Jane of All Trades, always learning and seeking to help.

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1 Comment

  1. Wow. Yes, yes, yes. This is how I feel about an awful lot of my education. There is a group of us from my alma mater who get together on-line to help support each other in not meeting our alma mater’s stereotype of success, support each other in being successful in other ways — ways that don’t necessarily enhance the school’s statistics, but do enrich our lives. Thank you for what you’ve written here — it brings a new perspective to my experience, one I really appreciate!

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