8 am January 13, 2014, I am back in school it has been a
little over five year and my first class is 19th 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 2nd 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.
