I sat in a room filled predominantly with freshman, and a rad-tech student who transferred in for the program. The professor began lecturing us about how this isn’t going to be grade thirteen, but I think we both understood that for some of them, it will be. The course is Criminal Justice 101, and it’s only in my schedule to fulfill a social science requirement. We’re assigned to read from a textbook and a memoir, only one of which I’m interested in. The professor went through the trouble to create a “Google Group” for the class—or at least he went through the trouble the first time he taught it. Both of us a half an hour early, the rad-tech student turns to me and asks if I like this school.
“Yeah. It has a lot to offer,” I answered wedging a bookmark between the pages of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. “But you have to put a lot into it, too.”
I guess this phrase carried over into my Modern Authors class. Our professor came in, and stacked the books side-by-side, showing us the titles that we’ll be reading. Until now, I’ve only seen them in sporadic arrangements amongst my other books, but yesterday I took a deep look into the workload for the semester. He had said that our pace is going to be roughly 150 pages a night, which wouldn’t be too bad if this was my only class. He told us that he would be our literary physical trainer—when we don’t think we can read another page, he’s going to make us annotate ten more. I absolutely love the material, and I hope that I can keep up with this.
I’ve already read the section we’ve been assigned for Faulkner, but I probably understand the significance of 30% of it. My heavy work for this week will be this book, and finishing my nonfiction piece. I’m writing about being afraid to take risks, and it probably won’t break a couple thousand words, but I do like the direction it’s taking.
The fall semester of my year as a junior has begun.
Stage Fright 