The question. “Ohh you’re in college… what year are you?”

As a homeschooler, I always preferred the numerical answer to the similar question asked in high school. (And yes we did have grades!) As current college students, we’re in quite an awkward place, however, in trying to answer this question. Even beyond conversation, your very identity, ability to communicate with other students, self-image, everything is tangled up in the answer to this question.

And now:

  • Effectively all WCC students are in the limbo of the prophets right now as to what class they are in.
  • Populi shows everyone except the incoming students of the Class of 2023 as having advanced to the next year.
  • Financial Aid forms show the same, showing us of the Class of 2022, for example as Sophomores.
  • Our class is starting to identify personally as Sophomores
  • I’ve gotten in the habit of calling the Class of 2021 Juniors (and yet somehow I still know them…)
  • BUT, our email lists still have us as under the last year’s classification

What are we?

It would obviously be best for the school to simply follow our class-identity. But as I just found out in “test-pinging” the class email lists for Freshmen and Sophomores the school is apparently basing this instead on something beyond any of our control.

As (? – Sophomore or Junior) Joe White answered me, “I am still a sophomore due to the fact that I have received your email” the school is putting us at the whims of one man, the one who controls the technology at the school, as to who we are.

But with them also calling us Sophomores by other tools of classification like Populi, and a conversation with John Henry purporting us to advance to the next class from the time of our final final, who really knows what we’re supposed to think.

It’s too confusing.

So why don’t we just go for the “tried and true” simple approach of having everyone self-report their preferred class, year (and maybe even grades). That way we’ll rid ourselves of class privilege, classal injustice and discrimination and become one big, happy family (err flexible social construct under one bio-renewable roof)

That would solve all our problems, right!

See what happens when you take the absurd, the idea of identity opposed to fact, and make it more absurd.

In truth, however, I do want to be fully recognized as a sophomore as I believe fact corroborates. Maybe its when Populi releases our sections that that really happens?