My desktop computer recently experienced power-supply-explody-itis and the cure is still in the mail so instead of posting the article I had been working on for this week, I'm forced to write about something else.
Perhaps the only interesting news, other than me being forced to do everything on my laptop, is that yesterday was, once again, the first day of classes.
I remember when I was little the first day of classes meant putting on new clothes – and the difficulty in deciding which of those new clothes would be worn on the first day – posing on the porch for “first day” pictures, then marching off to school with the one friend who lived on my street. It was always scary and exciting, lunchtime was a cacophony of “oh my god! I haven't seen you in forever”s, recess a recap of every thing done over the summer and, when I was little, new cubbies or shelves, and older, new lockers (clean for the last time for the rest of the year).
In high school there was the comparing of schedules to see who you knew in each of your classes and who you would sit with. There was always one class in which it appeared there was no one you knew, but inevitably right before the bell someone you could sit with would show up, so you were never alone.
And now all that has changed. Granted the first day of university does have some excitement – perhaps the greatest being the moment when you first check your syllabus and see that a particular class has no final exam – but all in all the thrill is mostly gone. After three years at university and after just finishing my seventh “first day of classes” here I'm sure it's lost all of the charm it once had.
I still happened to have some new clothes to wear, but I didn't fawn over them the day before, putting things together and deciding which was my favorite and which to wear on the first day, no one took pictures of me unless a security camera happened to grab a shot on my lengthy public transit hike down to campus, and while I did see some old friends I hadn't seen all summer, I knew ahead of time which classes I had with people I knew and which I didn't. I think that's the real problem: all the surprise is gone.
Every first class involves the same thing no matter what kind of class it is. You get the syllabus, the outline, they warn you about academic offenses (which they always claim at least one person commits each semester so I'm not sure the warnings are having the effect they're supposed to), tell you the textbook, their office hours and their e-mail policy, then, depending on the length of the class, they either let you go early or move into a first lecture which is almost inevitably review from the years before (“to get the whole class on the same page”).
I miss the uncertainty, which is weird for me. I'm normally one of those people who like to know everything in advance and perhaps I'm forgetting all the things I hated about the first day of classes back in elementary and high school, like the nervousness and the stressing out for weeks before, but I'm always smiling in my first day pictures and I remember them fondly.
Perhaps the other problem is that in university you get a first week instead of a first day as you never have all your classes on the same day. Everything seems so repetitive and dull. I no longer wake up early and carefully pack all my new supplies into my pencil case; I don't even have a pencil case anymore.
Maybe it's all for the best in the end though. They say classes don't really get started until the second week and that's the part I should be looking forward to. In public school the first day was exciting because it was a big change, it was something new, but by the second day it was boring and dreary and any excuse for a day off was already being planned. But here, in university, I get to pick my own classes and I'm truly interested in what I'm going to learn. It's the course that will make me excited, not the chance for a change.
People say “it's not the wedding, it's the marriage” and I think for school it's got to be the same way. “It's not the first day, it's the rest of the course”, and I'm hoping that mine are going to be great.
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