A Letter to Grad School
Dearest Grad School,
I know that I promised you we would eventually meet one another in person rather than via the interweb. However, it is with sincere regret that I may have made you a promise I can't keep.
As you could not have known before our infrequent longings for one another, I have some baggage concerning a previous relationship with the acedemy. You see, time management has never been one of my strongest qualities. To be sure, this is an understatement. In fact, one can trace this back to my very first experience with school, as far back as kindergarden.
If you will allow me, I will go into some detail here.
When I began Kindergarden, my mother thought it was a good idea that I should start in a french immersion school. Indeed, my mother also felt that my first experience with school should have engendered possibilities; moved towards a promised future. However, my kindergarden teacher did not feel the same way. By the end of my first year, she reccomended to my mother that I be taken out of the french immersion program because I was, in her words, "too slow learning".
But it did not stop there. Frequently through grade school, I discovered that I needed more time to complete the same assiqnments as my peers in class. In highschool, I was always the last one to finish a test. Furthermore, it was suggested to me by several guidence councillors that I may have, in their words again, "a learning disability" and that it might be a good idea to look into certain "medication" in order to supplement that weakness.
(Thankfully, I forewent using medication and spent additional tutoring sessions after school instead.)
You see, it was never a lack of attempt on my part. And those attempts, for the most part, yeilded promising results. But "better late than never" has always left out "...with consequences attached to it".
I know I promised you a fantastic thesis, one that would prove to you that my reading literature is as nessasary as my breathing. That writing ourselves is nessasary to even begin being ourselves. That what underlies all writing is an ethics, writing oneself as an 'other', that we must "move through the hands of others" and that this is the open-ended work of dialogue, rigor, compassion, and above all empathy. Woolf, to name one, would teach us that.
But don't be too sad. There will always be someone else there to fill my place. Someone, no doubt whom your more familiar with. Someone who has read The Lord of the Rings several times before their undergraduate degree. Or someone who would write you a thesis your more interested in. For example, something with the title "The (homo)textuality of Harry and Ron in the work of J.K. Rowling". Or the postmodern use of parenthesis, backslashes and elipses in 20th century poetry. You see its not all bad. In fact, it kinda works out better for the both of us.
Yours,
Derek M. Hamers
I know that I promised you we would eventually meet one another in person rather than via the interweb. However, it is with sincere regret that I may have made you a promise I can't keep.
As you could not have known before our infrequent longings for one another, I have some baggage concerning a previous relationship with the acedemy. You see, time management has never been one of my strongest qualities. To be sure, this is an understatement. In fact, one can trace this back to my very first experience with school, as far back as kindergarden.
If you will allow me, I will go into some detail here.
When I began Kindergarden, my mother thought it was a good idea that I should start in a french immersion school. Indeed, my mother also felt that my first experience with school should have engendered possibilities; moved towards a promised future. However, my kindergarden teacher did not feel the same way. By the end of my first year, she reccomended to my mother that I be taken out of the french immersion program because I was, in her words, "too slow learning".
But it did not stop there. Frequently through grade school, I discovered that I needed more time to complete the same assiqnments as my peers in class. In highschool, I was always the last one to finish a test. Furthermore, it was suggested to me by several guidence councillors that I may have, in their words again, "a learning disability" and that it might be a good idea to look into certain "medication" in order to supplement that weakness.
(Thankfully, I forewent using medication and spent additional tutoring sessions after school instead.)
You see, it was never a lack of attempt on my part. And those attempts, for the most part, yeilded promising results. But "better late than never" has always left out "...with consequences attached to it".
I know I promised you a fantastic thesis, one that would prove to you that my reading literature is as nessasary as my breathing. That writing ourselves is nessasary to even begin being ourselves. That what underlies all writing is an ethics, writing oneself as an 'other', that we must "move through the hands of others" and that this is the open-ended work of dialogue, rigor, compassion, and above all empathy. Woolf, to name one, would teach us that.
But don't be too sad. There will always be someone else there to fill my place. Someone, no doubt whom your more familiar with. Someone who has read The Lord of the Rings several times before their undergraduate degree. Or someone who would write you a thesis your more interested in. For example, something with the title "The (homo)textuality of Harry and Ron in the work of J.K. Rowling". Or the postmodern use of parenthesis, backslashes and elipses in 20th century poetry. You see its not all bad. In fact, it kinda works out better for the both of us.
Yours,
Derek M. Hamers