A sense of function but a disregard.
So I was in Dallas all this week for more housing training, which was sort've a mixed bag. A couple weeks ago I was in Phoenix, in a city I would have LIKED to explore but didn't have the time, taking a short class that I could have slept through. This week in Dallas, I didn't really care to poke around, but I was there for a week taking a class that turned out to be pretty enlightening. The class was on foreclosure intervention, which of course means 'stopping the foreclosure'. What most people don't recognize, though, is that it doesn't neccessarily mean 'keeping them in the house'. The class was also, supposedly, an advanced class which required a test to even get into. NeighborWorks (the education and certification body) doesn't understand that making people take a test online with no supervision might compromise the test's ability to accurately reflect someone's experience and knowledge, though.
There were points of the class where people were asking exceptionally basic questions, or asking for clarification on really basic subjects that the instructor (rightly) just mentioned and moved on from. If you were in an advanced level math course, you shouldn't be asking why there's a little superscript 2 next to a number and what it means, but that's about where we were. There were several points in the class where it almost felt like a one-on-one conversation between myself and the instructor, which apparently set me up for something that made me laugh at the time but is currently bugging me a little bit.
People are apparently surprised when they hear that I didn't really go to college. I say "really" because I don't think one semester at MU where your grades never crest over a C actually counts. When the class found out, the reaction was almost universally disbelief. You might imagine that several days into the class people had gotten the impression that I talk out of my ass a little bit, so some of them thought I was just joking.
I never really cared that people tend to look down their nose at me or assume I'm not that smart or that hard of a worker because I didn't graduate college. It's honestly an understandable attitude to me - graduating isn't the biggest hardship in the world but it does show a level of discipline (or at least proper connections) or ethic that others lack. But honestly now, here I am looking way more competent than 2/3rds of them, and suddenly it's unfathomable that I didn't go to school?
I guess I'm just bitching, here. It's a culmination of frustration that's been brewing for a bit - sure I don't have a degree, and that's something to definitely consider initially. But once I've proven that my experience and comprehension is just as good for the task at hand, maybe you can give me some fucking breathing room and regard rather than just mentally putting an asterisk next to my name in your head. "But he has a degree and you don't" should be something I hear less and less the more I bust my ass, not more and more as an excuse for why I'm still not being taken seriously.
We said we were going to conquer new frontiers,
Go stick your bloody head in the jaws of the beast.
We promised the world, we'd tame it,
What were we hoping for.
There were points of the class where people were asking exceptionally basic questions, or asking for clarification on really basic subjects that the instructor (rightly) just mentioned and moved on from. If you were in an advanced level math course, you shouldn't be asking why there's a little superscript 2 next to a number and what it means, but that's about where we were. There were several points in the class where it almost felt like a one-on-one conversation between myself and the instructor, which apparently set me up for something that made me laugh at the time but is currently bugging me a little bit.
People are apparently surprised when they hear that I didn't really go to college. I say "really" because I don't think one semester at MU where your grades never crest over a C actually counts. When the class found out, the reaction was almost universally disbelief. You might imagine that several days into the class people had gotten the impression that I talk out of my ass a little bit, so some of them thought I was just joking.
I never really cared that people tend to look down their nose at me or assume I'm not that smart or that hard of a worker because I didn't graduate college. It's honestly an understandable attitude to me - graduating isn't the biggest hardship in the world but it does show a level of discipline (or at least proper connections) or ethic that others lack. But honestly now, here I am looking way more competent than 2/3rds of them, and suddenly it's unfathomable that I didn't go to school?
I guess I'm just bitching, here. It's a culmination of frustration that's been brewing for a bit - sure I don't have a degree, and that's something to definitely consider initially. But once I've proven that my experience and comprehension is just as good for the task at hand, maybe you can give me some fucking breathing room and regard rather than just mentally putting an asterisk next to my name in your head. "But he has a degree and you don't" should be something I hear less and less the more I bust my ass, not more and more as an excuse for why I'm still not being taken seriously.
We said we were going to conquer new frontiers,
Go stick your bloody head in the jaws of the beast.
We promised the world, we'd tame it,
What were we hoping for.