The following is a piece I wrote for my English class, entitled "The Working Class of Academia". I thought I would share because I am quite proud of this piece. It was fun to write, and I took some artistic liberties with the language, which is always entertaining.
Enjoy!
The
Working Class of Academia
My
fellow students-of-higher-education and I belong to many diverse groups. We can
be divided by such broad categories as race, gender, religion, or age. We could
be divided by class standing. We could be divided by academic achievements,
social works, or cars we drive. We could be ordered alphabetically by last
name, or from tallest to shortest. I find myself in several of, if not several
tens of, these groups.
But of all the
classifications, divisions, groups, subgroups, delineations, demarcations,
accumulations, congregations, and combinations of students to which I belong, I
find one held on a more special pedestal in my heart, reserved a more plush
velvet bolster, and guarded by emotional trip-lasers, protected, even, by a
glass case of mental construction, like my own personal Hope Diamond. I call
the members of this classification The Workers.
The
Workers are locked in the academic marathon so often run by pursuers of a
brighter future; namely, college. However, as I mentioned above, there are
hundreds of groups that those of academic pursuits can be defined by and
clustered into, and many more subgroups for further refinition. What sets the
Workers apart? First, Workers are defined as students who care enough about
school to apply themselves the necessary amount to pass with at least B's. But
to further define Workers, you must analyze the amount of work they must put in to maintain said eighty-plus
GPA, and the resultant amount of social pursuit they are allowed or choose to take
as a result.
We
find, as a result of the natural spread of human talent and charisma, a rather
dramatic spectrum demonstrating the internal compartments within the Workers.
At the top of this spectrum, like the mighty eagle soaring on warm and easy
updrafts, we find the Breezers. These beautiful and enigmatic individuals
stroll through the hurdles of study as if floating lazily down a clear-shining
stream in a faded-white canoe with a dainty pink parasol of the finest silk
twirling merrily on their shoulder, and, as is so often the case in such
Victorian scenes, they are accompanied by a finely-dressed suitor serenading
them tenderly with the airy and romantic tunes of love, for the Breezers are
also the masters of the social scene. They number their friends in the dozens.
They are
intelligent and quick-witted, and therefore their studies are, predictably, a
breeze. They have a certain knack for scholastic work. The amount they are
required to apply themselves to reach the B is minimal, and they can spend
hours every day chasing fauns, playing pan flutes, and drinking from clear
mountain streams.
Continuing
on in our rainbow spectrum of Workers, we find ourselves now examining the
every-man group of the Workers, namely, the Center-Fielders. Like the dedicated
baseball players that serve as their namesake, the Center-Fielders are not the
All-Stars. They’re not the Home-Run Hitters, the Grand-Slammers, or the $10,000
Baseball Card-ers. But they’re also not the Strikers-Out, or the Bunters. These
easy-going and talented individuals work hard and have a consistent batting
average. They often find their early
afternoons dedicated to the absorption of intellectual material assigned by
their oh-so-sapient professors. Their evenings, however, upon completion of the
aforementioned osmosis, are usually open to the pursuits of more minor flights
of fancy, such as Mario Kart or Beer Pong.
The Applicators find collegiate speed bumps to be more along the lines
of a hike up an awesome and aromatic mountain side; moderately challenging, but
enjoyable.
The
third group in which Workers fall is the Home-Schoolers. These quiet Athenas
are on intellectual par with none, for none can match their mental tenacity.
Often these individuals were schooled under the shielding roof of their
family’s abode, and as a natural result, experienced less of the
rough-and-tumble sink-or-swim fall-or-fly fit-in-or-fall-out aspects of the
public schooling system. They achieve their status of intellectual isolationist
superiority by complete and total devotion to the art of study. They choose to
sacrifice the lighter affairs of courtship and other such social frivolities to
gain entrance into this elite group.
The
Home-Schoolers (important note: the name “Home-Schooler” does not necessarily mean that an individual
within this group was home schooled, merely that the group of working and
dedicated collegiate students who fall in this group share many aspects with
those who were) are closely related academically to the Breezers, in that the
amount they must apply themselves to
maintain a high grade point average is actually very little. They are, however,
the opposite of the Breezers socially. They usually have never been natural
social butterflies, and if they have been, they have since completely given up
fraternization in the pursuit of academic perfection. While the technical
definition for a Worker outlined above states that in order to be a Worker a
student must maintain at least a B
grade average, to do so is akin to failure in the eyes of a Home-Schooler. They
will happily settle for nothing short of the glimmering four-point-oh.
Finally,
at the end of our dissective vivisection we find the stragglers of the Working
world. This group serves as the anti-thesis to the Breezers, for whom life
comes so easily. This group is known as the Fighters. These poor gentlefolk are
running the wrong way down a greased-up ten-mile-per-hour automatic walkway
filled with angry and burly pedestrians and their over-stuffed Diane Von
Furstenberg matching luggage sets from the day they enroll to the day they turn
their tassels. They are not lazy; on the contrary, they are the hardest working
of the Workers. Despite their hard work, or perhaps because of it, they barely
manage to scrape their B grades from the gutters of self-sacrifice, and only
after they have given everything they have, everything they are, everything
they ever have been and everything they ever will be to the collegiate machine.
They have not the choice to partake in social endeavors, for to lose one hour
of potential study would spell disaster. Whatever instinct drives these mighty
salmon to swim upstream is more of a motivation than non-Fighters will ever
know.
That
is our spectrum of Workers in its entirety. From the Breezers to the Fighters,
and all that’s in between, we have effectively encapsulated the academic
Working class. However, it should be mentioned that not all the Workers will
fall neatly into one of these categories. There will always be unique
individuals who are indefinable, who fall somewhere in between. For example,
perhaps there is a student who finds academia to be a breeze, and yet suffers
socially, despite many hours spent in clubs and on dates. These members of
society lack the natural social skills of a Breezer. The academic standing of a
Home-Schooler is beyond their reach. They are more fluent in their studies than
a Center-Fielder, and far more fluent than a Fighter. This person falls through
the cracks into the all-collective basket I call Workers-Other, where he or she
is piled onto his or her co-Working-but-not-further-definable-than-that peers.
It
is important to make a point at this point. Workers, by definition, are
dedicated to their perspective fields. A Breezer is a Breezer, a Fighter is a
Fighter, and cetera. They would not usually change their method of study, for
that represents their particular signature on the vast parchment of student
methods, and it defines who they are and why they do what they do.
That
being said, should a Worker decide to change his or her methods, he or she
could easily move from one group to another. If a Home-Schooler slowed his
learning pace and balanced life’s scale with more social activities, he could
become a Center-Fielder, or a Breezer. Should a Center-Fielder abandon the
social side and dedicate herself to study, she could become a Home-Schooler.
And should a Fighter abandon his struggle, he would be carried mercilessly by
the relentless tide to another classification, somewhere in the dark and bitter
reaches beyond the boundaries of the Workers.
My
own self-diagnostic soul search places me firmly among the Center-Fielders,
where I happily form a balance between hearty swings and healthy bench-sits
with my teammates. But beyond my own group, I am part of the whole, and I feel
at one with the Breezers, the Fighters, and the Home-Schoolers, for we are all
united in the dedicated pursuit of our academic futures. In the end, of all the
possible student classifications in which I could be placed, this is the
classification to which I belong to which I feel I truly belong. I am proud to be a Worker, and together, with my fellow
Center-Fielders, the Breezers, the Fighters, and the Home-Schoolers, we shall
continue to fight on in the pursuit of the brighter future that hangs
glittering for us past the finish line. We will run the good race, and fight
the good fight, for that, by definition, is what a Worker does.
