Dizzy height of higher education

Dizzy height of higher education
April 9 - 15, 2001
... and why I will most likely not reach them.



	A view to the Valley from Cahill Ridge - lakes with fresh (our drinking) water lakes, San Francisco Bay behind them, followed by another ridge.

Junk mail comes to us with all kinds of offers, and typically ends in a waste basket. One such basket is installed right next to our mail boxes, so we don't need to drag all those papers all the way to our apartment. I'm not quite sure why I stopped there in the middle of February, to read a pamphlet of Foothill College. It even was not delivered to our mailbox, it was just laying around on a table in the corridor.

Anybody who graduated from high school can attend college. Every trimester, you can enroll in lots (on the order of several hundred) of courses, and if you are a California resident, it takes just a few bucks (about $100 per trimester, with twelve class hours weekly). I thought the courses would be limited to English, or something like specialty/hobby classes. But the pamphlet mentioned computers and programming.

I turned to our neighbor, Bara, to enlighten me about the classes. She used to lure me to attend English back in the fall, but I snubbed it thinking that my communication was better than most government employees (post office is dominated by Chinese, while social security offices are obviously a Latino domain), and here in California, practically everyone "comes from somewhere" -- those native speakers are quite few, while you hear accents all over the place. I concluded that they could certainly bear with one more Czech.

Bara lent me a comprehensive brochure with a full listing of courses. I was amazed what all possible topics get lectured, so just to widen your mental horizons:

Ceramics Critique Seminar - examination and critique of visual art objects
Women in Global Perspective - examination and analysis of the historical roles of women globally and the impact and influence of these historical developments on modern society internationally and domestically
Hiking for Fittnes - Hiking in the local foothills as an exercise to reach the appropriate level of sound cardiovascular health for a sustained period of at least 30 to 40 minutes. Will increase stamina, endurance, heart and lung strength.

Most courses are naturally quite normal -- languages, mathematics, chemistry, biology, economics -- and computers. After a family brainstorm, it got down to CIS 15A Computer Science I: C++. And since I had no idea how to enroll and what rules apply to me (for some reason, my type of resident status does not fit), I made an appointment with a counselor.

The counselor was nice, she assured me I can take classes at the college, explained that I will have to pay for them (I will become California resident after I will have lived here for a year), and that I should fill out an application. She got a bit startled after she noticed I did not have an application with me (she could not quite figure how I could wield the brochure, yet an application stayed with my neighbor, the rightful owner of the brochure), but eventually was as kind as to produce another copy. My asking, however, about applying online threw her definitely out of balance. In the end she admitted that she might have heard about some web pages where this can be done, but you know, all this interned nowadays is such a confusing technology.

Back at home, we had to work the application out together with Sid. The program consistently offered only Czechoslovakia as country-of-origin option; truth is, my high school degree says Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, but still... :-) Again I got stuck with, or rather without social security number. Such eventuality simply does not exist, a (semi)permanent California resident WITHOUT this silly number. We had to fool the program somehow by choosing a non-resident status..

So I was enlisted, and waited for March 12, to enroll for my selected course. Event that was possible, to my relief, over the network. They even provide an on-line availability listing for individual classes -- you choose one, and it spits out if it has free place for you. There were three parallel C++ classes, beginning at nine, ten, and eleven a.m. Naturally only the last one had free positions (existing students are given advantage over new ones - their enrollment begins a week earlier), but I did not mind, as long as I got in.

I confess I was quite nervous before the first class. My experience with studies are rather negative (I'm afraid that similar feelings were experienced by the other side as well :-) ). My first shock came during the parking of my car. Foothill College consists of many ground floor buildings (individual classes and offices have outside entrances, from a sidewalk), scattered over a hilltop, which is surrounded by a two-lane, one-way road, which is surrounded by seven large parking lots. I had no trouble parking during school holidays, but on the day school began (and on every following day), I had. Finally I figured out the system, shifted to first gear, and very slowly drifted behind a walking student, who looked like on his way to a car. After he unlocked it, took off his jacket and replaced it with a sweater about three times, located his glasses, drank some water, blew his nose, studied a map, put his glasses on, put away his handkerchief, folded the map, combed his hair into a neat split using his rear view mirror, tied his shoelaces, rearranged his schoolbooks, drank some more water, buckled up his safety belt, started the engine, searched and found a music tape, inserted the tape to play, and turned off the headlights, he finally drove off and I could sneak Cecilia into the freed spot.

It was a child's play to find the classroom. After a few dozens of us gathered at the entrance, some adventurer dared to try the door and step in. I was for my second shock -- I expected programming would be taught in a small (most likely computer) lab. Not quite so. I found myself sharing an auditorium with about a hundred other people. The third shock was the lecturer though a quite handsome male dithered around the projector at the beginning, a lady in her best years appeared before the board.

Our lecture had a solid structure. The lecturer introduced herself. She distributed papers with a syllabus - list of lesson subjects. She told us not to cheat by copying homework from other students. She told us that we MAY use a PC, but she prefers Macintosh. Further she informed us, that we should not cheat by copying our homework, as it is unfair. We were to use Code Warrior, while MS Visual C++ is not recommended, as she does not use it, and she would not be able to provide advice on it. Should we ever cheat with our homework by letting someone copy it, it would be discovered. We should purchase recommended material for the class (one fat book, one handbook, guess who is the author!). She never heard of a case that someone would be asked for an access card at the school lab, but she will try anyway to arrange them for us. If we elect to copy someone's homework, she will find out and she will deduct points from our score. Then she took the roll. A warning followed that we should not let anyone copy our homework, and we were free to go. I was leaving with a renewed impression that higher education is exactly the thing I should carefully avoid.



	Caché at Questa Park

Our Tuesday class had two parts. In the first one, we were notified that -- yes, you've guessed correctly -- we should not let someone copy our homework, and that we should create only one project in our computer, which should be reused by re-writing it for each new problem. It is awfully practical, and the lecturer has been doing it just this way with Word documents, too, so she has only one letter stored in her computer, which gets perpetually modified :-) . The second part of the lecture took place in a lab. Our professor took us, for some mysterious reason (or was it a mistake?), into a lab with PCs. She demonstrated how to complete our homework. She made just one error, by saving a file in such fashion that she was unable to find it again. After some ten minutes and with the help of three students, she located the file -- and a fact that the miserable PC uses file name extensions, which do, unlike on Macs, wreak havoc. There was no roll call.

I just began to decide to cancel the course and request my money back, when it got better a bit. Our Wednesday class was about the detail that we should sign our homework with first name first and surname second, or surname first, then COMMA, and then our first name, or we get zero points. Rest of the lecture was off the record, or rather I did not notice anything special as it was pure programming :-) !!! It amounted for whole twenty minutes, just consider it!!! :-)



	... they came from outer space :-)

Thursday's fifty minutes were entirely dedicated to programming, the word "homework" got only mentioned once, in context of a reminder to return it on Monday. I have no class on Fridays, and since they announced a "shitdown" (originates in the official term, shutdown, forced time off :-) ), we could regenerate together at home from everyday horrors. Sid was still nursng his cold, and a few easy days were long overdue.

Martin announced on Saturday that he had fixed his car (a gear box had disintegrated when confronted with their family holiday trip to New Mexico -- fortunately it was polite enough to give up already in Pacheco Pass - only a few dozens of miles from home), and that his wife and his boys (Simon and Matt) began to geocache furiously, after he bought them a GPS. We had to defend our family image and maintain our score, so we visited one cache at Questa. Too late - Vanas were there before us.



	All my cloak here is protection against wind. I'm bending down because I am seeking wild strawberries ... and the best ones sit right behing the fence to the water source area...

On Sunday, Sid was picking Krens up at the airport. They offered him a story about all electrical instruments going dead in the airplane right before takeoff, so they were delayed -- holidays are a stressful affair. All the way from SFO, they were rejoicing at the look of open pastures and green grassy hills - a lot of open spaces, unlike in Japan. While admiring hills at Cahill Ridge, Sid got inspired for a hike. He delivered Krens home, took me, and we headed for UFOs.

We have been wondering about these strange spheres on a hill behind a cemetery for a while already. Access to them is not forbidden, only nobody goes there -- very few get the idea to drive through cemetery roads and out of the back gate. Don't get me wrong -- we are no intruders of places of final rest, the gravestones are laid flat in the ground level (so that lawnmowers can drive over them) and mourners travel on paved pathways in their vehicles.



	Now you can believe me ... they were really ripe!

Speed limit 5 mph, we put on funeral faces and corresponding pace, dragging through. Cahill is a continuation of Skyline -- with similar arrangement -- ocean on one side, San Francisco Bay on the other. Just here it was devoid of people and we had an extra good view to Crystal Spring Lakes (one of drinking water sources for the Valley). A cold wind was blowing from the Pacific Ocean, but sun was warm. We walked along a protected water source area, gazing at wild flowers, disturbing some deer (they were all upset to be bothered by people), and we picked wild strawberries.

Yes, and it was Easter Sunday, but we don't celebrate anything. There's no Easter Monday holiday here, and Sid had to go to work as usual. Should somebody try to beat me (a strange Czech Easter custom), our orderly neighbors would most likely call the police :-)

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