A First Rule of Distance Learning

And an early rule about people and dealing with any choices or circumstances in life, really: If someone wants to find some rationale to put you down, they almost certainly will.

That you studied by distance education, that you earned credit with challenge exams or training in the workplace or community, that you did it at 15 or 45 or 75, that you earned a degree from an academic unit that's called Continuing Education or Extension or Adult something, that your school uses the term "concentration" for the generic "major," etc., etc., etc.…

Any of these could become such a reason some day.

And try as you might, you'll never quite outrun this.

Your degree on the ground at Harvard College could have a disappointing grade or two. Your subject area faculty there could be considered by others in their field to be disappointing relative to the expectations around the Harvard College name.

While you were doing that Harvard College degree, you could have not had some other chance to improve yourself in the world that would be associated with or would fit better with another degree elsewhere, or with not pursuing a degree at all.

You could rise to become President of the United States and get slags that you'd been at Harvard too long. You could get such an attack directly from your major party opponent who'd been at Harvard longer for an extra degree. This just happened!

You'll never quite outrun this. So live with it and be who you are and do it well?

In the popular idiom: "Haters Gonna Hate."

Find the tools that are right for you. Use them honestly. Do good work with them. You should get by.

 

Good advice. Do what you feel called to do and don't worry about what others think. There are also just as many people who will respect you for what you have done.

 

Very rarely in life do you find people who are highly critical of you who aren't themselves jealous, failures, or outright imbeciles.

I once worked with such a person who was critical of distance learning (though she herself had never done it), and she erroneously--due to complete ignorance--made the assertion that it must be "easier". Nevermind that she'd bragged about cheating her way to an AA in General Studies at a very bad local community college by paying people to write her papers for her, smh.

 

I thought that the first rule of distance learning was that we don't talk about distance learning.

 

The first rule is that we have to have a secret handshake and password so we can hide in the back alley and knock 3 times at the mysterious side door so we can meet up and talk about DL.

 

That pretty much describes my total indifference to every function available in high school. I mean, I really tried hard to give a damn but I just couldn't find a damn to give. I had my two best friends, (neither of whom attended my high school but for a brief time, but we still hung out every day after they left) and beyond them very little else mattered to me besides my personal projects which I was very passionate about. You'd think after kids keep inviting you to stuff and you never show up they'd get the message, but for 4 years I'd say 'no' and kids would still ask.

I recently ran into a classmate who I actually did like, and he asked me why I didn't attend the last reunion some time ago. I told him "well, besides you I didn't like any of them, and there are at least one or two I'd still like to punch in the face on sight... so... I couldn't care less about seeing any of them."

... He then invited me to the next reunion.

 

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