walking uphill in the snow...

I'm still awake... because my 19 year old little sister has a 10 page research paper due tomorrow for her Administrative Justice class at the J.C. Usually, my mom is the one to stay up, but I offered to do it tonight.

Ya see... my sister is very intelligent, but she has 2 flaws... dyslexia & procrationatia... ok... I made that last one up... but she does procrastinate a lot. She's been working on this paper since I've been up here, and she's got all the info, but she has to put it together in the right format... and someone has to help her proof read it because she spells a lot of words wrong, but because neither her dyslexia nor spell check will catch when she types "from" instead of "form" (and thousands of other similar mistakes), someone has to help correct the finished product.

Now this has me thinking... where would I be if I had the same opportunities that my little sister has, when I was growing up...

I'm 35 and grew up in a very small town with not a lot of people who got any farther than High School... My step-dad has an AA, and my mom grew up in England so I'm not sure what an equivalent degree would be, but it's not anything above a Bachelor, if even that... (I got curious and looked up my hometown on the internet... only 83% of the population has a High School Diploma and only 18% have any sort of college degree).

I wrote my term papers in high school on a word processor that looked like a type writer and allowed me to type out 200 character block, that were editable in chunks, and then would type it out... I had no internet... only the one public library... and if the books were checked out I was SOL... I had to format the citations and bibliography by hand... had no grammar check... no Google... and I had no way of contacting my professors other than visiting them during open office hours...

We did have a Commador64 when I was in high school... with a cassette drive... I honestly do not remember what we used it for (games probably), but I know I never used it for school. If there was something better in the late 80's, my family didn't have the resources to own it.

I really didn't enjoy college.. and even dropped 2 classes because there were large papers required and I hated writing research papers just that much. Computer classes were few & far between... and there was nothing fun about them... mostly DOS based stuff and the like... I hated formatting bibliographies and reading entire book was such a pain... What would it have been like if I had the search engines offered today and the ctrl=F function to find the exact information I needed.

I'm just thinking... which I haven't looked at classes offered... but if I were able to take graphic arts and web design classes at the JC today, my entire life may have gone a totally different direction...