Reflections: Fall 2009

Let's begin right where we left off: Fall 2009. On July 31, my family and I packed up a mini U-haul and on August 1, we drove down to the apartment I'd signed a lease for in June. I'd be living in this apartment for a year. It took a full day and some to get all my things into to my third-floor apartment. My family stayed the night with me the first night, and the next morning, we got up and stocked my fridge with food.

The week after that is a blur. I went back home for a dentist appointment. Then, on August 10, I started orientation for the new program I'd be starting. It was overwhelming. I didn't quite know what to do with all the information they were throwing at me, particularly the packets of information about teaching English 1100. I mean, what did *I* know about teaching? Throughout the week I learned about everything from the different degrees people sought, classes people took, and all the details about being a grad student in the English department. I also met my lead teacher, the professor I'd be teaching with for a whole semester in a real freshman composition classroom. Additionally, I met all the people who would be my colleagues and friends as we went to the bar, the movies, and even church together in an attempt to get to know each other. All this to say, I still had no idea what I was in for.

The first week of classes was rather anti-climatic. While I quickly learned that the reading load every week would be crazy, the difficulty of the semester wouldn't hit me until late September. Up until September, the most difficult part of my week would be sitting in class, simply intimidated by class discussions. Every Thursday night would be a relief, because the week would be over and I could escape from the pressure of saying something "smart" in class. Thinking back on this, I realize how insane that sounds, but Thursdays were especially rough with 6 straight hours of class discussion.

But then late September came. The first week of October I would have two conference papers due. Honestly, I had no idea what it meant to write a conference-length paper or a seminar paper. I didn't understand that research in graduate school half meant discovering what everyone else had done with the topic you wanted to write on so that you could bring something "new" to the topic. This doesn't even go into the fact that I would take over teaching my composition class in early October and was blindly preparing lesson plans. It all hit me at once; I mean, I was barely keeping up with readings week after week. But then real life happened; my grandmother died.

I would say that October was probably one of the lowest points in my life. Despite all the grief, school was still definitely at the forefront of my mind. I was so stressed about the paper I needed to write, I was reading the text at the funeral home. After that crazy weekend, I returned to school to accomplish all the aforementioned tasks. After staying up rather late the night before trying to perfect the paper, I nervously presented my first conference paper in one of my classes. After class, my teacher approached me, and I found out that the paper was horrible. I was told that if I turned something like that in for my seminar paper (the longer paper due at the end of the semester), it would probably fail. The same day, I had another paper due, but the teacher for that class gave me an extension because he knew I had just gone to a funeral the weekend before.

That same day, I had also started teaching for my comp. class. While the first day went well, the second and third class periods flopped, especially as I briefly tried to cover a variety of gender issues by showing films in class. My class was very against the films I brought in that presented stereotypes for homosexual and transgendered people. My lead teacher took me into his office one day concerned that the class was offended by the films I showed in class and that they were not understanding my assignment. I kept myself fairly composed in class the next few days and I created outlines to help my students better understand the assignment. Things got better, but this didn't change how badly I wanted to quit everything. I felt like a failure and without any close friends in my program, I felt so alone.

After making it through October, November went slightly better. When it came time to write my seminar papers, I ended up having several emotional breakdowns and even my computer broke down on me. In the end, however, everything ended up wrapping up quite nicely. Even though I had B's in most of my classes at that point, I ended up receiving high marks on two of my end-of-semester projects. My final grades ended up being pretty decent, and for that, I couldn't have been more surprised or grateful. After the horrible experiences in that one literature class, I decided majoring in literature was not my "thing" and switched my focus to rhetoric and composition. The semester from hell was over, and I had made it through thanks to my family and friends who were there on the other end of the phone for each high point and breakdown.

After enduring "Fall 2009," I vowed never to let myself take school that seriously again. I vowed to be more positive and to work harder at overcoming the anxieties I felt about everything. And in the next blog for this series, Spring 2010, I'll show just how much of a difference these two small changes made in my life.