Back in the Day

Yesterday, on the first day back to campus, still adhering to my New Year's resolutions about healthy eating—I brought whole-grain pretzels and vegan chicken noodle soup [Just add water and microwave!]—a mommy colleague accosted me to order Girl Scout cookies. I said no, in part because my colleague's daughter wasn't in tow. It's just wrong to push high-fat cookies on January 4, but it's so much more wrong to have moms selling cookies for their daughters.

I am reaching an age when I remember back in the day.

I was never a Girl Scout—I have been avoiding professional organizations since grade school—but my sister was. I remember helping Melody load up the rusted, red-metal wagon with boxes of cookies, after which we went door-to-door hawking thin mints. We were unsupervised, responsible for the money and cookies ourselves. The troop leader always had a sales contest to motivate the girls; whoever sold the most boxes won a bicycle or some other cool prize, which inspired our forays far from home. Melody always came in second, and when I think back, I now assume the contest was rigged. Our neighborhood—blue-collar working class—bumped up against a more affluent section of the city, all of the kids attending the same elementary school. I'm sure that the troop leader deferred to the wealthier parents, alerting them how many boxes they personally had to purchase to keep their daughters ahead of Melody, who was quite the saleswoman.

Back in the day, Girl Scouts developed independence, learned money management and the value of competition, and honed sales skills. Today, if my mommy colleague is any indication, the girls learn instead to rely on adults to do all of their work. I'm not opposed to Girl Scouts and their mothers sitting outside supermarkets selling boxes of cookies; I assume that the grocery stores require the adult presence for liability issues. I realize that in a world where children routinely get kidnapped or molested, that going door-to-door isn't an option any longer either. But to buy cookies from an adult without the actual Girl Scout present, realizing that the scout will later receive an unearned award, is just wrong.

As I said, I'm reaching that age when I remember back in the day when selling Girl Scout cookies meant dragging a heavy, squeaky, difficult to maneuver wagon all over the city—risking blisters, exhaustion, even robbery—for a colorful embroidered badge and, with any luck, a brand-new bicycle.

Even at work I catch myself responding with "Well, back in the day ..." For example, at the end of last semester, two of my colleagues were responsible for a group of 150 students. The "in charge" professor was tenured; he was paired with a much younger, temporary-contract colleague. Mr. In-Charge, despite the importance of the event, failed to show up on time, leaving Ms. Temporary Contract waiting in the auditorium lobby with 150 irate students. The gossip is that she just waited. She didn't call security to come unlock the door; she didn't contact the department office for directions. Her name didn't have "in charge" beside it on the assignment sheet, so she chose to stand there and broadcast her ineffectiveness. If last semester had been her first, I would understand, but she has worked at the college for a number of years and should know how to make things happen. But like Mommy Colleague's daughter, she has learned to let the "real" adults do everything and, when they're not around, just let nothing get done.

My second semester at the college, my primary duty was staffing the lab component of college-prep courses. I supervised/helped students who were working individually on problem areas in reading and writing. One evening during the first week of classes, a group of 25 students arrived in the lab. They had been sitting in an upstairs classroom for half an hour waiting for the instructor to show up. Now this happened back in the day, the late 80s, when I didn't have instant access via the Internet to faculty schedules. The students had an evening class, so the department office was closed. I had no one in authority for them to contact.

I could have shrugged my shoulders and told them that I didn't know what they should do. I could have advised them to go home when they got tired of waiting. But instead, I made an executive decision. Even though I was beginning only my second semester, I knew that the first meeting of prep classes included a "diagnostic" that determined what students worked on when they came to lab. I had copies of the diagnostic, so I had everyone sign an attendance sheet and take the test. I gave them the department phone number so that they could contact the office the next day to learn what had gone wrong. I told them not to worry, that there had to be a logical explanation for their professor's absence. I collected everyone's work as they finished.

It turned out that the dean, who, back in the day, handwrote faculty schedules on a tabled form, had told the instructor that she taught on Thursday night instead of Tuesday, the evening when the students showed up. No one was upset because I had not wasted anyone's time. The students performed a meaningful task and got credit for their presence, and the professor didn't lose an entire three-hour block of teaching time. "The only other thing I would have done," she explained as she thanked me, "was go over the syllabus, and we can do that next Tuesday." My dean was especially pleased because his error did not result in angry students, an angry faculty member, and a class beginning badly, as it would have if I had just waited.

And I didn't just wait because my childhood experiences had taught me to take responsibility and act—advantages of growing up "back in the day."