The Oldest Student in the Class

Summary

This is the story of how I came to be sitting in a classroom next to a girl who was born the week I’d started work.  She was the youngest student on the computer course and I was the oldest.  She was seventeen and I was thirty-three.  I was old enough to be her mother.  In fact, there was only one other student who was older than seventeen, and he was eighteen.  The course lasted two years and I then went on to do a degree, but that’s another story.



The Oldest Student in the Class

I was thirty-two years old at the start of the course for the BTEC Diploma in Computer Studies.  There was another student my age but he found a well-paid job and left before the end of the first year.  There was an older man but he wasn’t interested in computers so he found the assignments too hard.  He left after just a few months.  My advice to anyone planning to take a two-year course is to find a course you’re interested in.

My fellow students were mostly sixteen years old and were straight from school.  There was an eighteen year old guy who I never got to find out much about him.  He hung around with a nineteen-year-old and a twenty-five year-old who were both guys who’d been unemployed as long as they’d been out of school.  You might guess, from this, that most of my fellow students were male.

There were actually six female students at the start of the course but one left after a few months and there was a rumour that she’d left to have a baby.  Rumours abound in colleges.  In fact, rumours abound everywhere.  The other three girls were all friends and travelled together in one car from a city which had a college of its own so I wondered why they’d chosen to study in ours but they all gave different answers.  They left together, after the first year exams.  So the rumour went round that they’d been caught cheating.  As I said, colleges are fertile places for rumours to grow.  They’d been such a close-knit group that they’d never integrated into the class so, to be truthful, I only missed them a bit.

Those first-year exams cut the class down really drastically.  When we returned after the summer holiday, there were only eight of us left but I can’t tell you how many started the course because, oddly for a computer person, I have a bit of difficulty with numbers.  I think there were twenty-six but it might have been more.  I’d have to remember the people’s faces but, with me, that’s virtually impossible.  It’s out of sight, out of mind with me or, as a later teacher put it:  “I think you’ve got Asperger’s Syndrome, Kath.”

There was one other student who was new to our class.  He was from the group before us and he hadn’t achieved his diploma so the college was letting him repeat the second year alongside us.  He was the eighteen-year-old, and he was therefore, the second oldest person in the class.  He used to take his honorary ‘old man’ status seriously, and express disgust at my fellow female student’s choice of favourite television programme, “Pob” who, according to him, used to spit on the camera and then write his name in it.  I was so old the younger students didn’t try to engage me in conversation about children’s programmes, which was as well, because they hadn’t heard of “Andy Pandy” or “Bill and Ben”.  How times change.  Even “Pinky and Perky” have made a comeback.

With just nine of us, we became more of a close-knit unit and we were very effective at studying and at doing practical projects.  Our tutors must have thought that too, because they treated us more like people with equal intellects in the second year.

Actually, I’d been pretty confident at dealing with the tutors all along.

On one occasion in the first year, when we had an assignment which involved some complicated mathematical work and none of us could do it, we were all individually asking our other tutors for advice.  Then our subject tutor came into our classroom and said: “All the other tutors are saying to me: ‘Bill, your students are a pain!’,“  and he told us we had to do the assignment using Boolean Algebra.  Well, I’d only got a grade 2 CSE in Mathematics and I considered myself lucky to have got such a high mark as that so I said: “Bill, I left school in 1971 and I’ve never even HEARD of Boolean Algebra.”  And then he taught the whole class how to do the calculations so we could all do our assignments.

There was a later occasion when I reported a tutor from another course, for treating me and my project group like kids who needed to be chastised when all we’d done was work on our project in our empty classroom which he decided to bring his class into.  It wasn’t that he wanted us to move out; it was the bombastic way he delivered his message and the fact that he seemed to be trying to make himself look important in front of his class.  So, guess who walked into the office while I was putting in my complaint?  But he didn’t criticise me, to my face, after that, even when I made really stupid mistakes with the computers.



How do you insult two people in one sentence?

During the second year, the whole class (nine people) used to go to Macdonald’s for lunch.  Actually, I didn’t particularly like fast food so I mostly brought my own sandwich and a yoghurt, and I nearly got us all thrown out when a member of staff saw me eating it, even though I pointed out that eight of us were eating food bought there and that they wouldn’t even be in the place if I hadn’t come in with them.  I told you I talk too much.  I didn’t tell you I started to blend in.

However, one day when we were heading to the fast food shop, the boys were walking ahead of me and the other female student.  A woman with a clipboard came up to us and asked me: “Excuse me.  Can you tell me if she’s over fifteen?”  My friend said she felt as if she wasn’t supposed to have a voice of her own and, of course, at seventeen she didn’t like being mistaken for a school age kid.

Age was important to all of us at that time.  The younger students were young enough to be just getting comfortable with their identities.  To start with, they saw me as a representative of their parents’ generation but they got used to me and realised I have a personality and interests, just like they do.  I found them noisy and intimidating.  They spoke so quickly that I often couldn’t work out what they were saying.  We had very little in common and I couldn’t understand their jokes.

By the second year, they’d calmed down a lot and I’d loosened up.  I didn’t spend all my spare time working on assignments and they didn’t spend all their time socialising.  We’d got to know each other and we could compliment each other’s good points, or joke about each other without causing upset.  And at the night out when we left college, they tried to set me up with a boyfriend who was a mature student from another branch of the college.  Ah, young people.

So how and why did I get onto the course, and why did I move onto another one afterwards?

I used to go to science fiction conventions and, therefore I met a lot of male computer programmers, not that I’m stereotyping people.  After quite a few conversations with people who worked with computers, I began to think they weren’t, as I used to think, people with superior intellects but they were normal people just like me.  Because I worked as a knitting instruction checker, a female computer programmer told me I was probably capable of checking computer programs which, she said, were very similar to knitting instructions.

I tried it out by doing a part-time course at the Skill-centre.  I liked that so I enrolled on a part-time course with the Open University.  I enjoyed that, even though I did keep messing up the computer at the library, in the days when there was a special library computer in the nearest city with which people could link up to the Open University.  Before I finished that course I’d already quit my job and enrolled on the full-time BTEC course at the college.  And I liked that so I moved onto, and completed, my degree in Computing at the local polytechnic.

I say “my degree” with pride because, to me, it’s like a medal.  When I left school, my career choices were Nursing, Hairdressing, Shop or Factory work.  There was no hope that I’d ever go to college because I’d failed my two ‘O’ levels and only managed two CSE grade 1’s.  Now I have a certificate and a photograph of me in a graduation gown.  It wasn’t my childhood dream because I didn’t even know degrees existed.  But it did give me confidence and I occasionally tell my kids I’m a “computer expert”.  It’s nice.  And it started with being the oldest student in the BTEC class.