[December meme] defining life moments
sheafrotherdon prompted: Three defining life moments!
1.
Late in the summer before my senior year of high school, I did a week of college visits. The idea that I might actually go to college was still fairly new at that point; I hated school, and I was skeptical about the prospect of college because the people I knew who had gone to college made it sound pretty much just like high school, except with the underage drinking in bars rather than back yards and the pot smoking in dorm rooms rather than town parks. But I had gotten a brochure from the college that eventually became my alma mater, and it looked kind of amazing, so I begged and begged to be allowed to visit, and in return I let my parents arrange visits to other (closer to home, "more suitable") schools that I was not at all interested in.
When we got to the school I was excited about, I thought it was beautiful -- the central square, the campus buildings, everything. And then the tour started, led by a woman with a shaved head and unshaved legs, wearing Birkenstocks and a nose ring, who led us through campus walking backwards and talking about the physics class she'd taken in that building, the biology class she'd taken in that building, the student activities housed in this building, her favorite places to study in the library coming up on our right... We walked out onto the library quad, and there were little groups of students around -- their classes started the following week, which meant many students were already back -- and there were people playing frisbee, people napping in the sun, but also little knots of people sitting around telling each other about the books they'd read that summer, people making plans to go buy their textbooks together and get started on the reading, and several people who'd climbed up into the trees around the edge of the quad and were reading there.
I was one of a very few people at my high school who admitted to liking reading, who read things voluntarily, but here it seemed... normal, maybe even something that everyone did. I felt absolutely, utterly at home. I never wanted to leave. At that moment, I knew that I wanted to go to college, that I wanted to go there.
Attending that college is still probably the single best thing that has ever happened to me, the single best decision I have ever made.
2.
My junior year at that college, I took an upper-level writing class that trained students to work as peer writing tutors. As an English major, I'd always been asked by my parents and their friends if I was going to be a teacher, and I'd always said no, because I didn't want to be a middle- or high school teacher and -- I mean, what other kinds of English teacher were there? But I liked writing, and I was pretty good at it, and a couple of people I knew had taken the class and said it was great, so... okay, why not?
That class made me a better writer and a better student, but it also showed me what I wanted to do with my life.
I remember sitting in the pub in the basement of the student center on a rainy day, working with a first-year chemistry major who was really smart but struggled to articulate in writing her thoughts about literature. Her draft was just -- stilted, and cramped, and uninteresting, and it didn't sound like her at all. So I turned the paper over and started asking her questions about how she understood the novel she was supposed to be writing about and taking notes on the blank backs of the pages while she talked. And after about twenty minutes, she came up with something so interesting and I said Stop stop stop, let me get that down and then shoved it across the table for her to read, and she looked at it and got this huge smile on her face and said That's it, that's it and grabbed the pen from me and started drawing lines and arrows back to the other things she'd said. And twenty minutes after that she had a thesis statement and an outline developing that thesis statement and a list of things she needed to go back and look at in the novel, and she looked happy, excited, confident. And I thought, This is what I want to do.
I didn't know yet that I wanted to be a professor -- I didn't know how that worked, I didn't know anything about grad school, it hadn't occurred to me that I could become like the college teachers that I idolized any more than it had occurred to me that I could sprout wings and fly. But I knew, with absolute certainty, that I wanted to have more moments like that.
3.
Years later, quite a while after I graduated, I was back at my alma mater for an alumni meeting. I was staying with
renenet, who worked there at the time, and one evening -- the first evening I was there? the second? I'm not sure -- I turned to her and said, "So tell me about this show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
"I can do better than that," she said; "I can show you." The show had started airing daily on FX just that week, in order, from the beginning, and she had taped four of the first five eps.
So we watched them. And then I made her summarize the next five seasons for me so I would be caught up when S6 started airing the following week.
Shortly after that the two of us held hands and jumped into online Buffy fandom and... kind of never came up for air.
:D
Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read
comments on Dreamwidth
1.
Late in the summer before my senior year of high school, I did a week of college visits. The idea that I might actually go to college was still fairly new at that point; I hated school, and I was skeptical about the prospect of college because the people I knew who had gone to college made it sound pretty much just like high school, except with the underage drinking in bars rather than back yards and the pot smoking in dorm rooms rather than town parks. But I had gotten a brochure from the college that eventually became my alma mater, and it looked kind of amazing, so I begged and begged to be allowed to visit, and in return I let my parents arrange visits to other (closer to home, "more suitable") schools that I was not at all interested in.
When we got to the school I was excited about, I thought it was beautiful -- the central square, the campus buildings, everything. And then the tour started, led by a woman with a shaved head and unshaved legs, wearing Birkenstocks and a nose ring, who led us through campus walking backwards and talking about the physics class she'd taken in that building, the biology class she'd taken in that building, the student activities housed in this building, her favorite places to study in the library coming up on our right... We walked out onto the library quad, and there were little groups of students around -- their classes started the following week, which meant many students were already back -- and there were people playing frisbee, people napping in the sun, but also little knots of people sitting around telling each other about the books they'd read that summer, people making plans to go buy their textbooks together and get started on the reading, and several people who'd climbed up into the trees around the edge of the quad and were reading there.
I was one of a very few people at my high school who admitted to liking reading, who read things voluntarily, but here it seemed... normal, maybe even something that everyone did. I felt absolutely, utterly at home. I never wanted to leave. At that moment, I knew that I wanted to go to college, that I wanted to go there.
Attending that college is still probably the single best thing that has ever happened to me, the single best decision I have ever made.
2.
My junior year at that college, I took an upper-level writing class that trained students to work as peer writing tutors. As an English major, I'd always been asked by my parents and their friends if I was going to be a teacher, and I'd always said no, because I didn't want to be a middle- or high school teacher and -- I mean, what other kinds of English teacher were there? But I liked writing, and I was pretty good at it, and a couple of people I knew had taken the class and said it was great, so... okay, why not?
That class made me a better writer and a better student, but it also showed me what I wanted to do with my life.
I remember sitting in the pub in the basement of the student center on a rainy day, working with a first-year chemistry major who was really smart but struggled to articulate in writing her thoughts about literature. Her draft was just -- stilted, and cramped, and uninteresting, and it didn't sound like her at all. So I turned the paper over and started asking her questions about how she understood the novel she was supposed to be writing about and taking notes on the blank backs of the pages while she talked. And after about twenty minutes, she came up with something so interesting and I said Stop stop stop, let me get that down and then shoved it across the table for her to read, and she looked at it and got this huge smile on her face and said That's it, that's it and grabbed the pen from me and started drawing lines and arrows back to the other things she'd said. And twenty minutes after that she had a thesis statement and an outline developing that thesis statement and a list of things she needed to go back and look at in the novel, and she looked happy, excited, confident. And I thought, This is what I want to do.
I didn't know yet that I wanted to be a professor -- I didn't know how that worked, I didn't know anything about grad school, it hadn't occurred to me that I could become like the college teachers that I idolized any more than it had occurred to me that I could sprout wings and fly. But I knew, with absolute certainty, that I wanted to have more moments like that.
3.
Years later, quite a while after I graduated, I was back at my alma mater for an alumni meeting. I was staying with
renenet, who worked there at the time, and one evening -- the first evening I was there? the second? I'm not sure -- I turned to her and said, "So tell me about this show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
"I can do better than that," she said; "I can show you." The show had started airing daily on FX just that week, in order, from the beginning, and she had taped four of the first five eps.
So we watched them. And then I made her summarize the next five seasons for me so I would be caught up when S6 started airing the following week.
Shortly after that the two of us held hands and jumped into online Buffy fandom and... kind of never came up for air.
:D
Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read
comments on Dreamwidth