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In seventh-grade “Career Planning” class, I had to take one of those psychology tests that ask the same few questions a dozen ways each, as if you could forget your answers every few minutes. But as the unpopular oddball, I was clear about schools. Learning was fun, but school was not. Every time the test asked about more education, my answer was none. Tech school? Nope. Master’s degree? No, thanks. PhD? What for? But in high school I changed my mind about education: A sheepskin might be my ticket out of the lumpen middle class. But how? The only thing I was ever any good at was homework. Most subjects were hopeless for someone unable to remember rules. Sports couldn’t help someone unable to recall how to move his body the same way twice. But a bad memory mattered less in academics—teachers mistook it for creativity. I sat through the entrance exam and got junk mail from one engineering school in the South, plus Dartmouth College, a brochure that got me dreaming. When I finished the application form, my parents just laughed. Who in his right mind would send fifty dollars to a rich East Coast school? I ended up at Brigham Young University, the only place fool enough to foot the bill. My stepfather considered college a waste of time: “Why don’t you get a job and do something useful?” he asked, but he did drive me fifty miles south to the campus and dropped me o¤, suitcase in hand. The place I rented in the international house had seventeen students cooking strange-smelling foods, but I stayed in my room doing homework. My major, Latin American studies, went fast, with classes like Latin dance. Two years plus one semester later, the BA got me two internships apprenticing with bureaucrats—first in the USDA writing trade policy papers and then for the UN analyzing tari¤s for imports like “edible o¤al”—but no job. I went back for a master’s degree, starting out in economics at Maryland , but dropped out because of health problems. I moved back to BYU Accidental Academic, Deliberate Dad k evin g . bar n hur st 116 02 Part 2_Manu 7/1/2010 5:30 PM Page 116 part time and finished coursework in communications before getting kicked out. Seeing a draft of my project, the advisor said I didn’t understand “the nature of graduate work” and swore he’d never allow me to get the degree. But when he went abroad on sabbatical, another professor alerted me so I could finish. Instead of a job, I ended up with freelance gigs in editing and design, based on two grad school courses I’d taken. Becoming a dad was di¤erent. My own family was a put-together mob of thirteen kids, a real yours-mine-ours plus, in my case, theirs. I longed for what I never had: a dad. I liked the din of home life, but wanted a small family, I told my wife-to-be, “Maybe just five.” She had other ideas: a big family with three kids. When the first arrived, I was a stay-at-home dad and soon discovered this rule: Put an adult and a child together, and one of them gets bored. So I changed my mind—one was enough, a dream fulfilled. Instead we had two more, quick. Friends asked if we knew “where babies come from,” but we knew. Each came from a birth control method that failed: diaphragm, condom, and the pill (these would make swell nicknames , I joked). I wanted to call my first son Chance (we had also used spermicidal foam on our honeymoon). Instead we named him Joel Sky, the first for something serious, the second for something fun, a flyer for Sky’s Christmas Tree Lot. A few weeks later, my wife conceived a second, disproving the old saw that nursing prevents impregnation (and neither did the spermicidal gel). We named him Andrew West, the first name a serious form for what we preferred (and good thing, too, after Drew Barrymore got famous) and the second to mark our move from the East. The pill worked best, blocking sperm for a year. Then the third came along, and we named him Matthew Penn, the first name sticking with the biblical theme and the second in honor of my first published essay. (I can’t explain the double t’s and...

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