Credit by Exam

The Coast Guard, luckily for me, (and mainly from tight resources) relies heavily on OJT - on-the-job training - to qualify its personnel. That's a good thing, because I've never been one to revel in extended classroom "butt time".

Back in junior high and high school, I schemed every trick imaginable to escape from the stultifying confines of those terrible four walls of lecturehood. Testing out, two classes at once, credit for outside activities, dual-credit classes; and my personal favorite, "excused" absences for the purpose of furthering legitimate extracurricular activities. (I missed more than a few days of high school to perform in paid gigs out-of-state. Those were cool chits to route!) It was all about the electives, then, anyway: how many pointless core requirements could I clear out of my day to make room for the good stuff?

College was, quite, the culmination of these years of curiously channeled creativity. In college, lectures were not compulsory; only results counted. I traded somnolent droning for dark tables of dusty books dug from the Bodleian's stacks, runs around the sports grounds to memorize ancient languages, and the midnight-to-0500 shift at the keyboard, typing away furiously at the essay due at daybreak.

Class time it wasn't. It keeps nagging me, somewhere back of my mind, that perhaps I should go back to school one day - fully funded, no less; career-enhancing, certainly. One day in mandatory training explodes that deceptively tempting thought. Classrooms and I don't cohabitate comfortably.

Here, then, I've been busy knocking out "credits by exam", as it were. I was excused from nearly two full months of mandatory pre-arrival training on the proposition that I would gain all that knowledge by doing, on the job, on this patrol. I am a practical learner; we've been busy; it's been ideal. Plus, instead of parking my butt in a plastic chair to blink my eyes sleepily at an soporific instructor, determined to close the last of the hundred Argusian eyes, I've kept watch in the sunshine and the wind on the bridge wing; I've darted around in the dim blue air-conditioned hum of CIC; I've crept through the ship late at night, in port, between endless days of drills and exercises and assessments, skipping the pub crawl to trace the firemain and diagram damage control systems.

There's still the oral board at the end. Which always, despite my level or source of preparedness, challenges me, if only because I overthink the questions and doubt my communicative abilities. Put me on the bridge in bad weather with a distress call from a small sailboat; put me in CIC as we're corralling a runaway skiff or creeping up, defenses at maximum alert, to a suspect vessel late on a dark night. Put me on the conn as we navigate a tight spot. Let me do, demonstrate, train, coach, take action. I trust the kinetics. The academics I study.

In this I have, at last, succeeded. I have earned my key qualifications, with (hopefully) a couple more to follow shortly, before I leave. This time, my reward was not electives, free time, or near-residence at the music faculty. This time, my reward was 6th Fleet operations - the Mediterranean. Work and play. Anything but the classroom.