By Bethany Peterson/editor-in-chief
Classes have started. Books have been bought. The war for parking spots has been declared.
Instructors stand ready to impart knowledge. Students search their brains for space to cram another semester’s worth of information.
But in all those slides and essays, don’t forget the other education that’s waiting for you at TCC.
Sitting across the room are people who can teach you what might never be written in a textbook or flashed across a PowerPoint but is just as important as the information listed in the syllabus.
A man sitting in the next row taught me that even when one dream dies another can be dreamed. Though he had to close his once successful landscaping business after the economy tanked, he is now in college with hopes of starting a new business someday.
The leader of a group project taught me how to include all the ideas and efforts of four completely different people into a successful product. She taught me how to pick up the slack caused by another lazy member and how to turn down an idea without hurting someone’s feelings.
In the computer class I thought I would hate, I learned a few friends and fellow sufferers sharing study tips and funny stories can make even the most uninteresting of classes a bright spot in my day.
The veterans in my classes taught me about service and perseverance. They forge ahead with their lives despite troubling memories of their service, disabilities they fight to overcome and battles at home to get the funding and support promised them. Yet I never heard one regret serving.
I learned how to keep my house from getting destroyed by a tornado in government class and how to handle a family emergency in history.
These lessons have no formal test. I didn’t try to remember them.
But they have stayed in my memory longer than the number of representatives in the House and have already proved more useful than the specific heat of water.
So this semester in the rush of deadlines and note taking, don’t neglect the other educational opportunities available.
