Like Professor Ugoretz, I believe training is an ugly word for what I am doing in college.  I am not training for anything, unless I am pursuing a career in procrastination and exploring my interest.  What an interesting career choice that would be!  However I cannot seem to find a median salary for procrastinator anywhere on Google, and apparently exploration seems to have gone out of style since the days of Magellan and the Conquistadors.

But i digress.

I will not be trained in college.  I was trained at my job working at Modell’s when i was seventeen.  I was trained on which way to face baseball gloves to be most appealing to customers.  I was trained as to which shin guards were the best financially to sell.  And I was trained to add an order of socks to every purchase, regardless if they were eight dollars a pair, and even when it was obvious the customers, whom I knew from my own neighborhood and youth leagues, whose kids I personally coached in intramural sports, were shopping there while counting pennies trying hard not to take their kids out of Little League.  And the more senior members of the staff (the nineteen year olds) were trained to admonish me for not forcing pairs of socks and these poor parents.

I hated that job.

I refuse to believe I am being trained again.  I propose that I am DEVELOPING.  I am not being trained to read at a higher level, I am developing skills I already had, and improving the quality and understanding of literature, at the same time increasing my appreciation for it.  I am not being trained to write academically, I am developing my own writing style, a writing style I can be proud of, a writing style I may one day want to share with the world.  I am not being trained to be a psychologist, I am developing skills to help me think cognitively, and developing an understanding of the layers of the human psyche.  This development may never help me in my career path, unless it helps me to understand people better.  Or maybe I am being trained to make things sound better than they really are.

I have not been trained in college.  I have developed skills that I have been developing since i was two years old, and if you tell me that I am delusional and I am being trained but do not even know it, well then I will just be upset.

But I do truly believe there is a difference.  When I hear the word trained, the images that come to mind are Pavlov’s dogs, trained to be hungry when they hear a bell.  The other image is a kid raising his hand, asking the teacher for permission to leave the room to use the bathroom.  Even in the most urgent case, sitting in that seat bouncing up and down, hoping the teacher would call on me and be merciful enough to allow me not to urinate on her classroom floor.  That is training.  And training is important.  At an early age we are trained to raise our hand before asking a question or leaving the room because it avoids mayhem.  It avoids chaos.  It keeps things in order.  It keeps the teacher in control.  These things are all of the upmost importance.  Even through high school, it keeps things in order.  It shows respect for the teacher (although if a teacher told me in the 12th grade I could not use the bathroom, I most certainly would flip out).  At least one has the courtesy to ask.  It is perfectly fine to train a kid in some things, hoping that early training will develop into something the student realizes is right.  The student in college may not need to raise their hand in class, because by then they have realized themselves it is wrong to interrupt a teacher or another student.  They need not ask to leave the room, because hopefully they have developed a sense of courtesy, enough so that they would not abuse the privilege, and would try not to disturb the teacher on the way out.  This training is perfectly fine.  I would call it developmental training to make me feel better.

I wonder what pressuring semi-clueless parents on a tight budget to buy eight dollar socks would one day develop into?

My best guess would be Bernie Madoff.