REVOLUTION BLUES
No matter how well-educated I may feel, or how sharp I believe my powers of perception to be, I seem to run into a moment which occasionally impairs my idea of myself as a competent, smart person. Unfortunately for me, these moments are most likely to occur on the first day of a new or difficult class, in whichever situation makes me feel that I can't always give the right answer. This happened today in the first meeting of Question of Sentence, a rhetoric class which attempts to sketch the history of the sentence as a contested, dramatic battlefield of ideas about meaning and importance. Yes, fair enough. It sounds like an amazing class. But as soon as we started talking about what makes a sentence a sentence, I felt absolutely red-faced and shameful. I don't really know. I really don't know. Etc. The professor is amazing: charming, brilliant, full of interesting digressions all, but I felt that I ought to be trounced out the door for my ignorance on the topic at hand.
I suppose I should know better than to take this too seriously; it's happened plenty of times in other classes (in very recent memory, even) which have ended up being splendid and amazingly educational. But still, not really knowing anything about something as fundamental as grammar makes me feel like the biggest fraud in the English department. I can certainly fool my peers into thinking that I've got every stitch of the perfect preperatory education under my belt, but that's clearly not always true. It makes me feel angry, poor, and shameful at the same time. The only teacher who ever attempted to teach grammar was my favorite, Mrs. Hatfield, and even then we only stayed on the sorts of basics that I had worked out for myself by that point. Everything else relies on my having read so much. How unfair, then, to put me in this university full of people who have gone to better schools than me, and expect me to teach myself in order to make up the difference. What on earth am I good for at all, then?
Add to this that I feel I've become an extremely boring member of my circle. Everybody else is constantly staying up until three or four, drinking or smoking or whatever, and doing risky things, and I'm in bed at 12:30 with cold creme under my eyes. I think the problem with experiencing so much alone time over break is that it's made me rather shell-shocked in relation to all of the constant goings-on of living with four people. I don't know how this works. My first kiss was very boring. I never published erotic fiction under the name, "Lucretia," much less by the age of 15. I've never been anything really except a girl sitting at a window seat on the school bus, pretending that the snow and vetch outside was a bombed-out Soviet landscape. We're really kidding ourselves if we think otherwise. We're really kidding ourselves if we think I know what I'm doing.
No matter how well-educated I may feel, or how sharp I believe my powers of perception to be, I seem to run into a moment which occasionally impairs my idea of myself as a competent, smart person. Unfortunately for me, these moments are most likely to occur on the first day of a new or difficult class, in whichever situation makes me feel that I can't always give the right answer. This happened today in the first meeting of Question of Sentence, a rhetoric class which attempts to sketch the history of the sentence as a contested, dramatic battlefield of ideas about meaning and importance. Yes, fair enough. It sounds like an amazing class. But as soon as we started talking about what makes a sentence a sentence, I felt absolutely red-faced and shameful. I don't really know. I really don't know. Etc. The professor is amazing: charming, brilliant, full of interesting digressions all, but I felt that I ought to be trounced out the door for my ignorance on the topic at hand.
I suppose I should know better than to take this too seriously; it's happened plenty of times in other classes (in very recent memory, even) which have ended up being splendid and amazingly educational. But still, not really knowing anything about something as fundamental as grammar makes me feel like the biggest fraud in the English department. I can certainly fool my peers into thinking that I've got every stitch of the perfect preperatory education under my belt, but that's clearly not always true. It makes me feel angry, poor, and shameful at the same time. The only teacher who ever attempted to teach grammar was my favorite, Mrs. Hatfield, and even then we only stayed on the sorts of basics that I had worked out for myself by that point. Everything else relies on my having read so much. How unfair, then, to put me in this university full of people who have gone to better schools than me, and expect me to teach myself in order to make up the difference. What on earth am I good for at all, then?
Add to this that I feel I've become an extremely boring member of my circle. Everybody else is constantly staying up until three or four, drinking or smoking or whatever, and doing risky things, and I'm in bed at 12:30 with cold creme under my eyes. I think the problem with experiencing so much alone time over break is that it's made me rather shell-shocked in relation to all of the constant goings-on of living with four people. I don't know how this works. My first kiss was very boring. I never published erotic fiction under the name, "Lucretia," much less by the age of 15. I've never been anything really except a girl sitting at a window seat on the school bus, pretending that the snow and vetch outside was a bombed-out Soviet landscape. We're really kidding ourselves if we think otherwise. We're really kidding ourselves if we think I know what I'm doing.
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