Back To School

     8 am January 13, 2014, I am back in school it has been a little over five year and my first class is 19^th Century British Novels.  The building I am in has barely changed.  They don’t change the buildings already in place they just build new ones.  I walk into room 326, a little groggy, I woke up at 6 am because I couldn’t sleep.  I am nervous.  I am 28 years old and I am nervous about school.  The feeling that this is not where I am supposed to be is in my stomach as I sit down in a desk 4 rows from the door and 2^nd from the back of the class.  I don’t want to be too close to the front, and seem too eager.  I also don’t want to sit all the way in the back and seem afraid.  It is a delicate dance inside my own brain that no one actually notices.  I wonder if these others think about this as I take in my surroundings.  I am early so there are only about 5 people sitting spread out throughout the class.  There is a dry erase board up front, white walls, white floors, white ceilings.  The room is intentionally made boring so attention is paid to learning.  There are two girls having a conversation a few desks away from me. 

“I was accused of cheating in highschool once… it was cuz I wrote too good.”

     This seems like the sort of chit chat that you would get in a class that only English majors would take.  The class begins with roll calling and I look at faces as she reads the names.  I could be the oldest person in here but there are a few that may be close behind.  Everyone has an ipad, or iphone, or kindle all of which have been mass-produced and issued to everyone in the time I have been out of school.  This reminds me to pull out my flip phone and turn it off.  I then start to look around the room to inspect the females in the class.  There seems to be a prevalence of women no longer wearing skirts or pants just shirts and what I remember as tights.  I think they now refer to them as pants, and functionally they are.  There are some subtle differences though. 

     The professor hands out index cards.  She asks us to write our full name, what we like to be called, what gender pronoun we prefer, and something about ourselves that we think may make this class challenging, if any.  I immediately start to panic.  For a total of 15 seconds I convince myself that I have no idea what a pronoun is, and that I don’t belong as an English major and that I will never be successful in this class or any other.  I also start to try and examine my gender identity and that also worries me a little.  As for something about myself that will make this class challenging.  Well there is the chronic hereditary laziness.  I am a slow reader.  I haven’t read any of the novels we are reading this semester.  And I tend to get distracted.  I wrote on my card.

"JOSEPH PARTINGTON COLEBURN…’JOE’…’HE?’…I think what may be challenging for me is finding the time to express all of my unique insightful ideas about literature during class discussion!!!"

 

     Before class is over we go through the roll again, but this time the professor wants us to share what we expect from an English class.  Do we like lectures?  Do we like informal discussion?  Do we like sitting in a circle, or sitting in rows?  What do we like about lectures?  What do we like about informal discussions?  What is it that is so comforting about sitting in a circle?  When she gets to me, I mumble something about not minding how we sit and that I prefer discussions and she continues on with the roll.  Around the last names beginning with the letter ‘s’, someone says, “I enjoy diversity of analysis.”  The next person on the list says: “I also enjoy diversity of analysis.”  I chuckle on the inside and start to feel better.