The understanding of life

By Rylan Tuohy
Muhlenberg County School

Jared Holt never thought he would break a rule at the Governor’s Scholars Program. But when he was standing alone in his dormitory laundry room, he reached for his forbidden cell phone, while surrounded by rumbling machines that he couldn’t figure out.
Jared Holt had never before done laundry.
When he arrived at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Jared was one of nearly 1,100 high school seniors who had been accepted into the prestigious Kentucky’s Governor’s Scholars Program, a five-week college residency designed to encourage academic excellence and leadership skills.
But his five-week vacation from home also included some unexpected rules and responsibilities. Among the rules were mandatory attendance at classes and daily curfew. Cell phones were restricted to the dorm rooms. Among the responsibilities were personal hygiene and household chores often performed by parents, like housecleaning and laundry.
Now Jared is an intelligent fellow, now an incoming senior at Paducah Tilghman High School. And, like his fellow Governor’s Scholars, he completed a rigorous seven-month application process to be accepted into the program. To him, laundry was more of a challenge than a chore. So instead of learning how to do the laundry, he decided to hire someone else to do it for him.
It just happened that he had a friend who was attending GSP on the same campus. She had agreed to do his laundry for an “unknown amount,” but the night before his laundry was to be done, Jared’s phone beeped. The text he received was a set of detailed instructions on how to do laundry. His employee had quit.
Jared looked down at his stinky pile of clothes and thought perhaps he could make it until Family Day in two weeks. In fact, out of the 358 Governor’s Scholars on the Bellarmine campus, an estimated 70 percent of males who went home on Family Day had their parents do their laundry, according to an informal survey.
But Jared knew he couldn’t make it.
“I either need to get some Febreeze,” he said, “or tackle the laundry machine.”
He did the latter.
So here he was standing in the middle of the laundry room, his face reddened by frustration and the moist heat of laundry equipment, with his forbidden phone in hand. The text said separate lights and darks, but there was only one washing machine open, “So I just put them both in together,” he said.
After 45 minutes had passed, he found his laundry still dry.
He had forgotten one small detail – pulling out the knob.
Of course, Jared isn’t the only one who has suffered an embarrassing defeat in a battle with a couple of dumb machines. John Stigall, a fellow scholar from Heath High School in Paducah, mixed his new, self-made, tie-dyed shirts with his whites and ended up with rainbow-colored v-neck T-shirts. Alex Gardner, a staffer in the GSP office, found remnants of detergent all over his clean laundry. Turns out he had had poured the detergent directly onto his clothing. And Morgan Davenport, a Residential Advisor in the dorms at Bellarmine, recalled the time when she was a scholar in 2008, and one of the students persuaded another one that red items wouldn’t bleed onto white clothing if you stuck them in a mesh bag.
Pink was all the rage that year.
“Individual experience is important”, said Aris Cedeño, Executive Director of GSP. In this case, he said, parents may complain about the different colors of clothing that scholars bring home, but in GSP, every person leaves campus having a unique learning experience, not the same.
“What you learn here is all in the understanding of life,” he said. “Laundry included.”