I learned this week that there is a much better way to make melted cheese on bread.
At one of the places in the Student Union food court, they make a broiled cheese:
Fresh ciabatta
Slice of american cheese on each half
top (liberally) with shredded cheddar cheese
Broil 'til gold and bubbly
Put halves together
nom
I got one because it was only $3 and I had a slightly upset stomach so I didn’t want anything too exciting. I just made it at home for my fiancee, along with some Campbell’s sirloin burger soup. He just called out to me to ask if we had more fixin’s to make another sandwich. Normally he asks for more of the soup.
Well, I learned you can cook a meatloaf (ball?) in the dented, wobbly top half of an old-style (done on top of the stove) popcorn popper. Everybody liked it. I didn’t tell them it was the first time I’d ever made a meatloaf (ball.)
Memorizing my Social Security number. Yes I know I’m dating myself because they haven’t used your SS number as your ID for umpteen years. But it probably IS the most helpful thing I learned (Sorry Dad! Thanks for paying for my education anyway! :p)
Memorizing such numbers is very handy. A sampling of numbers in my brain:
Mr. S’s and my SSNs
Mr. S’s and my driver’s license numbers (in WI, these are 14 alphanumerics long)
Five bank account numbers (his and mine)
Haven’t gotten around to memorizing CC numbers yet. Of course I always knew the license plate numbers on our cars, but now they’re all vanity plates, so that’s not as impressive.
A long time ago at work we were discussing this topic, and one guy said he didn’t even know the license PLATE number on his car (not a vanity plate). Really, dude? I know your plate number because I park behind you every day. It’s six characters. Hell, I still remember the guy’s plate, and I quit that job 18 years ago.
It’s more about who you meet than what you learn. Maybe this is expected but it happened to me in an unexpected way. It’s been 18 years since I transferred to the university where my Associate’s, Bachelor’s, and now (eventually) my Master’s degrees have all come from but the friends that I met there have been lifelong, wonderful friends since that time. The unexpected part is that two of them were originally my professors and those two and another friend that I met at the time are all older than my own parents.
The only person I am still close to from college (I graduated in '84) is my husband**. Other than that I have no contact with people I met in school, college or HS.
**He was my RA freshman year
I don’t mean this to be flippant, but I learned that college is just a holding tank where you wait to mature because the rest of the world doesn’t want to deal with your bullshit.
We would use the free unlubricated condoms they handed out everywhere to cover the smoke detectors so people could smoke weed in the non-smoking dorm rooms. Never underestimate the ingenuity of a pothead.
The corollary is – that people don’t actually expect you to know it all! That was wonderful to learn. I felt like I could deal with things then. Almost 40 years later I have virtually no hesitation in pleading ignorance to something because knowledgable people are usually happy to help.
Several of my courses would split the tests in two parts (theory and practice); the theory you had to do without aids, the practice with aids (whether that meant the book or your own notes would depend on the class); in Biochemistry, 10% of the final grade was from the “map of biochemical reactions” that we drew, used as an aid and then handed in with the test. Other courses were all-practice, with aids.
The first teacher who told us we’d be using aids said “one of the most important skills you’ll be expected to learn here is how to find information. Remembering exact values of atomic weights, or reaction heats? That’s what the library is for.”
I learned college/university doesn’t make you smart. It took me a while to digest that some of these people would end up with degrees, even though they couldn’t fill out the forms correctly!
One of my high school science teachers said approximately the same thing. He said that if we got jobs in the science field, that most of the time we’d probably look stuff up, rather than have it memorized. He was also the first teacher who said that keeping a class notebook was completely optional. He recommended it, and he’d certainly look over any notebook that we turned in, but he didn’t grade them.
