The price of tuition comes in all forms

What an amazing week it has been. If anything Metropolitan State College of Denver is teaching me how to constantly deal with adversity. The price of tuition comes in all forms. Over the last 2 weeks they have been anything but reliable, yet, I push on. It must be that natural filter at work here. Difficulty filters out those who don't really want to have something. So far, you really have to want the education Metro is selling. Last week the required class of English writing and research was cancelled 100% of the time. Then, by legislated disaster, it was also scheduled to be missed due to Labor Day weekend. 2 days week I have come to campus 3-4 hours early in order to get some much needed homework caught up. Yesterday both the internet and the school website were down almost the entire time I was on campus. What was supposed to have been an extra productive day of school wound up being just the opposite. 

The Auraria Campus Bookstore has perfected the methods by which it extorts money from it's loan-burdened populous. September 4 was the last day a student could return a book for a full refund. At midnight September 4 all sales are final and it's buyback season. What a wonderful program. Changes to classes haven't come to a close yet, but the bookstore's profits by acquiring your future earning dollars in the form of student loans is now guaranteed. Anything they sell you after that date can NOT be returned for ANY reason, including death, disability, or a final change in class schedule. They happily sold me an overpriced book for a class not yet attended, only to tell me they aren't buying the books back, nor taking any returns with a receipt. 

Upon arrival to my first day of class (having missed 4) with a book I can no longer return I asked my fellow students what all I've missed, or what I needed to know about the prior 4 classes. In various forms from multiple students the collective answer is "nothing". Ouch! Not what I was hoping for. OK, so instructors can be difficult. This is a leadership class, so surely it's going to wind up being something to which we can follow along. So the class starts out with a couple of New York Times articles illustrating different leadership perspectives. He discusses the new information we have just been given as if we were already familiar with it. Given that it was all just handed to us, he could have saved us all a bunch of time and just told us what he wanted us to know. Then the class digresses. For the next hour of Leadership and Social Change the professor banter on and on about world population control. At no time did he ever ask for feedback that was any different than his own, in fact, it was discouraged. Upon the close of the class on my trip down the hall, I asked a couple of fellow classmates what we were supposed to have taken from that class from a leadership perspective. Again the answers are "nothing."

So here I sit on campus again, after a tutoring lesson in inferential statistics, of which I just got the book ordered through the mail the day after the 5th class. No worries though, I got it cheap, but at a price. The internet has been down for about an hour, and the school's website where we are supposed to conduct all of our official business is down as well. So, Last week, Metro scored 0% failure in English, and this week 60% in connectivity "on campus". If I can pull of a successful post-secondary education with these odds, the real world ain't got nothin' I can't handle!