Class time 1
This was my first week of classes.
Throughout December and into January, I had had a continual nagging worry that even with all the reflection and talk of changes, my life looked fundamentally the same as before I had left. Same jobs, same friends, only slightly differences in how I occupyied my free time. I’d paid lip service to wanting to move away from the dark periods of subsistence but had not had the courage to act on my convictions. This week, however, there were actual small steps forward.
I have to remind myself of that, and do it often, especially in the evenings, when I’m lying in bed, mind still racing, trying to put together the next two, five, ten years of my life. It runs into walls over and over again and as I curl up alone trying to shut out all the reasons why everything I’m trying to do is pointless the thought that maybe I should just give up and let go continues to slip in somehow. Before this week I had nothing that I could point to as an example of change, nothing that I could cling to as a promise to future me that life will be better.
In a way, the actual subject matter is secondary at this point. Granted, the two classes of lecture that I attended were more recaps of material I’d vaguely remembered from sophomore year chemistry at St. X than new and interesting insights into the way that life worked. I was blessed by my time at St. Xavier with a strong understanding of the foundations of a variety of scientific disciplines: chemistry, physics, biology, math, to name a few, and my not-insignificant natural talent helps to allow me to shore up weak spots in my knowledge relatively quickly. If, no, when I continue to take more challenging and complex classes in my remedial training, I’m sure that the pressure and difficulty will increase exponentially. For now, though, it was the atmosphere of coming into a lecture hall, of sitting down and taking notes, of being presented with information and molding my understanding of the world around me to accommodate it that was what I took away most from the lectures.
Along with the lecture class, I am enrolled in a corresponding lab course. The two couldn’t be more different in almost every respect. The lecture has perhaps thirty or forty people, moves quickly from topic to topic and the professor is reserved almost to the point of catatonia. The lab has twenty people or less, the TA leading it appears to have only ever taught a class perhaps once before, and the atmosphere is one of friendly cooperation.
I have to admit, sitting down with a ruler to measure mussel shells at a lab table, however banal the exercise, was at least some small echo of one of the aspects of South Africa I’m trying to recapture. There I was measuring seeds with calipers and a light microscope for hours at a time, and the results would eventually go toward helping craft a new piece of scientific knowledge. Here I was filling in the blanks in my lab workbook along with every other person in the room, going through the motions that proved I knew what I was doing. But the two activities were at least in the same family, however many times removed.
In the short term, these echoes made it that much more difficult to sleep that evening, reminders of what I was missing, and the next day going to work it felt as if maybe the whole experience had been a dream, or something that would only ever happen once and then never again. As I mentioned earlier, I have to continue to remind myself that this is a reoccurring thing, something that is now a part of my life, and one which will hopefully become a larger and larger part as time goes by. I have homework now, and responsibilities to my school work that I need to push myself to fulfill. It’s a feeling that I’ve not had in over half a decade, and one that is in some ways more difficult than back when I was an undergrad, because I’m the only person holding myself accountable for my efforts.
In that same vein, ever since graduating from Wittenberg, and probably even before that, I’ve had a reoccurring dream. It takes several different forms, but the general outline is this: I’m late for a class and I’ve forgotten something important that I was supposed to do, a project or something. Or a similar shape: I’m late for the exam of a class I’d forgotten I was signed up for and now I have to take it cold. Something to that effect. From talking with other people and doing some reading on the subject, it turns out that this is a far from uncommon dream, right up there with losing your teeth or being chased. It’s a dream that stays with us for decades after leaving school. Now though, when I wake up in the morning and have that fleeting worry that I’ve forgotten to do some reading assignment or type up some paper, I find a strange comfort in the fact that I do have homework that needs doing, and there is a project that I need to work on. It’s a connection to that older time in my life, a time when I was bright and vibrant, and hopefully a connection to my future as well, a future in which I’ve not just returned to that state, but surpassed it.
Throughout December and into January, I had had a continual nagging worry that even with all the reflection and talk of changes, my life looked fundamentally the same as before I had left. Same jobs, same friends, only slightly differences in how I occupyied my free time. I’d paid lip service to wanting to move away from the dark periods of subsistence but had not had the courage to act on my convictions. This week, however, there were actual small steps forward.
I have to remind myself of that, and do it often, especially in the evenings, when I’m lying in bed, mind still racing, trying to put together the next two, five, ten years of my life. It runs into walls over and over again and as I curl up alone trying to shut out all the reasons why everything I’m trying to do is pointless the thought that maybe I should just give up and let go continues to slip in somehow. Before this week I had nothing that I could point to as an example of change, nothing that I could cling to as a promise to future me that life will be better.
In a way, the actual subject matter is secondary at this point. Granted, the two classes of lecture that I attended were more recaps of material I’d vaguely remembered from sophomore year chemistry at St. X than new and interesting insights into the way that life worked. I was blessed by my time at St. Xavier with a strong understanding of the foundations of a variety of scientific disciplines: chemistry, physics, biology, math, to name a few, and my not-insignificant natural talent helps to allow me to shore up weak spots in my knowledge relatively quickly. If, no, when I continue to take more challenging and complex classes in my remedial training, I’m sure that the pressure and difficulty will increase exponentially. For now, though, it was the atmosphere of coming into a lecture hall, of sitting down and taking notes, of being presented with information and molding my understanding of the world around me to accommodate it that was what I took away most from the lectures.
Along with the lecture class, I am enrolled in a corresponding lab course. The two couldn’t be more different in almost every respect. The lecture has perhaps thirty or forty people, moves quickly from topic to topic and the professor is reserved almost to the point of catatonia. The lab has twenty people or less, the TA leading it appears to have only ever taught a class perhaps once before, and the atmosphere is one of friendly cooperation.
I have to admit, sitting down with a ruler to measure mussel shells at a lab table, however banal the exercise, was at least some small echo of one of the aspects of South Africa I’m trying to recapture. There I was measuring seeds with calipers and a light microscope for hours at a time, and the results would eventually go toward helping craft a new piece of scientific knowledge. Here I was filling in the blanks in my lab workbook along with every other person in the room, going through the motions that proved I knew what I was doing. But the two activities were at least in the same family, however many times removed.
In the short term, these echoes made it that much more difficult to sleep that evening, reminders of what I was missing, and the next day going to work it felt as if maybe the whole experience had been a dream, or something that would only ever happen once and then never again. As I mentioned earlier, I have to continue to remind myself that this is a reoccurring thing, something that is now a part of my life, and one which will hopefully become a larger and larger part as time goes by. I have homework now, and responsibilities to my school work that I need to push myself to fulfill. It’s a feeling that I’ve not had in over half a decade, and one that is in some ways more difficult than back when I was an undergrad, because I’m the only person holding myself accountable for my efforts.
In that same vein, ever since graduating from Wittenberg, and probably even before that, I’ve had a reoccurring dream. It takes several different forms, but the general outline is this: I’m late for a class and I’ve forgotten something important that I was supposed to do, a project or something. Or a similar shape: I’m late for the exam of a class I’d forgotten I was signed up for and now I have to take it cold. Something to that effect. From talking with other people and doing some reading on the subject, it turns out that this is a far from uncommon dream, right up there with losing your teeth or being chased. It’s a dream that stays with us for decades after leaving school. Now though, when I wake up in the morning and have that fleeting worry that I’ve forgotten to do some reading assignment or type up some paper, I find a strange comfort in the fact that I do have homework that needs doing, and there is a project that I need to work on. It’s a connection to that older time in my life, a time when I was bright and vibrant, and hopefully a connection to my future as well, a future in which I’ve not just returned to that state, but surpassed it.