Call me a nerd but, I have something to admit.
I love school.
I love fresh textbooks and sharpened pencils. I love taking notes and organizing handouts.
And, I love to learn.
Perhaps this has been why I just can’t get it right in deciding what to go back to school for. I’ve known for a while that I wanted to. I’ve been accepted into various programs over the course of the last ten or so years. I’ve had a private cheerleading team of people telling me, ‘Go for it!’ but found myself uncertain of exactly what ‘it’ was.
And now I think I’ve found it, but am still giving myself one more class, one more class to go all in.
And now, it is time for my second confession.
For the first time in my life, I’ve found myself at the end of the alphabet in a classroom setting.
It is something so completely out of my control and I do not like it one bit.
During my undergrad years, I was in a comfortable spot at the middle of the alphabet. “L” lands you in a place where you won’t be chosen first, you aren’t usually randomly selected off a syllabus, and you generally end up scheduled to present work early, but not too early.
On my first day of (online) class, we had to introduce ourselves, tell why we were taking the class, and what kind of things we like to write about*. There were fifteen of us and at the start we were all bright eyed, leaning forward towards our screens, pumped for class to begin. The teacher asked follow up questions. He commented on interesting points students brought up about themselves. But then as we moved from the early alphabet to the end, the questions took a shorter and briefer turn and the students slouched in their desk chairs.
I had plenty of time to determine what I wanted to say after listening to my fourteen classmates, and did so with barely an “Um” uttered. When I finished, the teacher clapped his hands and said, “Great! Why don’t we go ahead and take a fifteen-minute break?”
*It was a writing class, so, go figure.
I quickly learned “W” lands you in last place, because teachers tend to favor alphabetical order, and during your presentation everyone will be watching the clock instead of listening to you speak.
When I mused about this end of the alphabet discrimination to Hubby, he responded with, “Isn’t it the best?” and proceeded to list how wonderful all the things I was disliking were to him.
I marveled that in thirteen years of owning this last name, this is the first experience I have had in disliking my place at the end of the alphabet.
But it has also become a bit of a humorous story for me, too.
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