No Undergrads Were Harmed in the Making of this Blog Post…

One of my classrooms is no longer a classroom, but a locked storage closet for textbooks.  These must be very important textbooks, because neither the janitor nor the building supervisor has a key.  Even the ROTC guys, who really “own” that part of the building, can’t open it. 

So I taught outside, on old stone steps that lead to a walkway that doesn’t exist anymore.  I yelled over first-day-of-school traffic, with its beeping horns and the occassional squeal of breaks as someone discovers the idiosyncratic way in which we let our streets become one-way all of a sudden and with very little signage.  This is West Virginia.  If you aren’t from here, what the hell are you doing driving on our streets anyway?  The students were gracoius.  All of my students have been gracious and eager and interesting and funny and people I would like to know just for the sake of knowing them.

The more experienced GTAs tell me this is both impossible and quite obviously the sign of some strange sort of first-day psychosis.  I think they are wrong.  I gave an assignment to be turned in by Wednesday, and said they had the option of emailing these to me.  I already have half of them,  and they are interesting stories about complicated people who do lovely things.

I think the only conclusion that can possibly be drawn is that I got all the best English 101 students, either by some statistical fluke in the university’s registration program or (as I prefer to think) some unmeasurable kindness on the part of the universe. 

I am a lucky, lucky person.  Thanks, Universe!

Wait, I’ve Made a Terrible Mistake…

I’m halfway through the two-week seminar that is supposed to make me ready to teach English 101.  I am not halfway ready.  In fact, I am much less ready than I was before I started this process in a room full of people almost all of whom seem young beyond my imagining and they have a good five to fifteen years on the freshman who will be walking into my classroom in exactly two weeks and one day.  See, I am reduced to panicky, run-on sentences and on the verge of paranoia.

I spend a lot of time on the couch, imagining what I will say on that first day.  I see myself as a frousy-haired, rumpled but kindly old woman who will remind them of their mothers–or, God forbid, their grandmothers–and win them over with lots of corny encouragement and sometimes homemade cookies because they are, after all, college freshman and so by definition broke and hungry.  Or maybe I’m the funky old lady who has been there and done that and wins them over by not being shocked when they forget to come to class because they’ve fallen in love for the first time since leaving home and couldn’t force themselves to crawl out of bed to make it to class for almost an entire week.  But probably I am not.  Probably I will just be some alien with a gradebook and a frown that they have to suffer in order to become physical therapists and computer engineers and novelists who will dedicate their first books to some other, better English professor they will have down the road.

English teachers are supposed to be cool, and I am so not cool any longer.  (If I ever was.)  I think I have made a horrible mistake.  Now excuse me while I go stand in front of the mirror and practice asking if you’d like fries with that.