This is an opinion column

They’ll be gone soon. It won’t be long now.

Even though they’ve just graduated from high school, students are working at their summer jobs and getting ready to pack up, move out, and go off to college. I saw some of them at a big-box store with their mothers, deciding what to buy with all that graduation money that came addressed just to them.

What do they need? What do they want? What should they take with them and what should they leave behind? Much of what they take is unnecessary, like extra heavy blankets if they’re going to a university in their home state of Alabama, or all the stuffed animals they’ve shared their bed with for years. (Take one, a recent college grad advised. It will remind you of home. If you take more, people may think you’re juvenile.)

They should also take an open attitude, a willingness to hang out with people who look different from them, have a different religion, or speak a different language. If everybody looks like their homeroom class back where they came from in Mobile, or Montgomery, or Moulton, how can new students learn about the world, the one that’s bigger than the 67 counties in their home state of Alabama?

They should listen to the sounds of the varied languages floating in the breeze over the quad. Maybe they’ll learn a few words themselves. There are more than 7,000 languages, not to mention dialects. If they pay attention, they’ll hear more than Southern American English with its drawls and y’alls.

They should take with them a new way of looking at personal space. Their dorm suite or apartment may be only 500 square feet, but it’s their own territory. Nobody will come by each morning to remove pizza boxes and hang up damp towels. They should remember this is not Hotel College. It’s just college. Nobody will wash their clothes for them; they have to learn that red shirts washed with white socks make pink socks. It’s not a complicated formula. It’s just a fact, one that most students learn pretty quickly.

And if they run out of toothpaste, they can’t call Mom who’s 200 miles away. She’s got her own toothpaste at home and expects them to have their own in that dorm room she’s paying for every semester.

They should take with them a clean slate. They’ve just been given a chance to be better students than they were in high school. Their English teacher doesn’t know they failed their Shakespeare exam last spring. They can start over and read “Hamlet” and “Othello”—the real text, not the study guide. They can do better.

And if students take a history course, they should have an understanding that history is nothing to fear. We live in a time when people who’ve never taught want to tell those who’ve always taught what to teach. History should include the good, the bad, and the ugly. Otherwise, we’re stuck with a watered down version of what happened.

When students come home for the first time and lie down on clean sheets that somebody else washed, or eat food that somebody else cooked, they may have a new attitude. Generations that came before worked hard to put them in those clean sheets. It takes college students a little while to learn one of the best lessons college can teach a young person: gratitude.

Contact Beth Thames at [email protected]