I think there is exactly one person following my blog that hasn't had a post since 2011, and today he is rewarded. Organizing file folders, I stumbled upon this old, random reflection that I must have written at some point during graduate school, and though it was written entirely without purpose, and needs editing, I'd love to give it an audience. ( Hi, George.)
My meandering point in the found writing piece takes a new significance now, in my third year of teaching. It reminds me of my love of learning...beckons me to return to school, and persuades me that I am in a unique position as a teacher, to give a certain gift.
#selfaggrandizing
Being Schooled
It’s a reflective time of year, with final grades being posted and dorm rooms being sorted and stuffed into plastic garbage bags serving as luggage. I’m an outsider for the first time this May: though I’m graduating for the second time in two years, Graduate School has none of the breathless incredulity that Undergrad did. Now, I feel I’m walking the shaded paths of the university not as a student but as an employee (thirty-five hours a week staffing the desk at the writing center) and though I’m now on the receiving end of my monetary relationship with Rutgers, there is less joy in it then you might think.
I watch the students with a melancholy resignation, not quite wishing their position but vividly recalling my own: those early morning walks to a coffee shop and then class, the thrill of a hard written essay affirmed and lauded by a respected professor. I miss the early semester trips to the bookstore with reading list in hand, the lovely possibility of each title. I miss the time spent procrastinating with West Wing re-runs I can’t imagine I’ll soon again have the pleasure of watching, in my pajamas, at nine in the morning. Getting my English degree was full of incidental perks- now that it’s got, it stands alone.
I’ve always enjoyed school- perhaps because I’m less of an independent thinker than I like to admit. My training to be a teacher has discouraged me from thinking of students as sponges, even as I see myself as a porous, wide-eyed and passive little creature, soaking it all in. Why drag me into small group activities when I want nothing more than to sit and listen, prettying my sparkling clean page with lines of ink. The overall quality of my professors have run the gamut to be sure- a pontificating, sweating Poli-Sci instructor with a crush on Justice Scalia comes to mind on the low end- but the ones who have awed me have had to do nothing more than speak with the quiet passion that envelopes their expertise.
Some of these professors built wonderfully fulfilling semesters out of the most icky of period requirements- walking me down literary roads I doubt I would have traveled without a push. I remember the indignant disbelief with which I hefted the 816 page Longman edition of The Faerie Queene now as a milestone- a “when we first met” moment that grows sepia-tone in retrospective context. That first night I performed a dramatic reading to the amusement of my roommates, waving my hand theatrically as I accentuated the Old English.
“So soone as day forth dawning from the East/ Nights humid curtaine from the heavens withdrew/ and earely calling forth both man and beast/ commaunded them their daily workes renew.”
Their amusement waned when it came time for The Hills, and I was left alone with Spenser, armed only with a highlighter. To no one’s greater surprise than my own, the weeks that followed were fantastically engaging- my fear and struggle rewarded in full. In my previous courses I had always written papers without much effort, and now for the first time I drafted and re-drafted, printing stacks of secondary sources and purging hours worth of work to try to clarify my argument. By the end of the semester, I had found within those archaic lines some powerful notions about time, virtue and memory- I had found some meaning that was both wholly relevant to my experience and deliciously alien.
Another semester and another return from the bookstore: this time holding not Edmund Spenser, but Lynda Barry, Daniel Clowes and Phoebe Gloeckner. My disbelief this time around was not in the heft of the text but in the scope of the pictures: I couldn’t quite believe that my undergraduate studies included this full page homage to the naked male form. Neither could my roommates. The Hills was a snooze-fest compared to page 43.
So it was understandably difficult, weeks later, to persuade them that in fact the graphic novels weren’t pornography, they were volumes in an exciting genre that blended visual and textual representation to arrive at a new form of telling. (I lost them somewhere around “textual representation”.) That semester I studied these books, among others, with a keen interest in the ways that they attempted to make private traumas public, and fell deeply in love with such authors as Alison Bechdel and Marjane Satrapi. Once again, my coursework had changed me; had so swiftly and exponentially expanded my knowledge that I was left with a contradictory notion of ignorance that has lingered long since. The more I learned, the more convinced I felt that I could never know enough.
The gaps of my studies blare too brightly- it is with shame that I admit I failed to take a single college course on Shakespeare, and still aim to call myself An English Major. There is a file on my iTunes, an unabridged audio recording of The Tempest, that suggests I was required to read at least this one play for some survey course, but my complete lack of memory regarding the details should tell you just how far that plan got. I didn’t make it through The Quiet American, and there is some British Literature from the 19th century (particularly of the sensational variety) that I skimmed, and that’s putting it generously. Sometimes, in the layers of my hard drive, I’ll happen across an essay I wrote and read it through to the end without a single moment of recognition- it’s my writing style, sure, but when did I ever have so much to say about Borges? If I was only able to retain all that I have learned, these authors and theories and contexts, I would know everything about art, and the human experience, and why I love to study literature in the first place. Or at least I’d know what the hell Borges was talking about.
Maybe.
When I think about my time in college, it presents in montages of scenes like that of reading The Faerie Queene or watching mid-morning television. I’m walking to my Intro to Creative Writing course at 9:45 on a Thursday in late April. I’m holding an iced-decaf- French Vanilla coffee with just a little bit of milk please and it’s basically the weekend, because I haven’t taken a class on Friday since my Freshman year. Obviously. There are those little pink blossoms littering the street, the ones that make you feel like you are living in the final scenes of a romantic comedy, and there are four poems in my bag, the first I’ve ever written. I probably won’t be able to bring myself to read them out loud today, but that is alright because I’m not intended to deliver. I’m being schooled. I’m here to learn.
