No, not because I want to save the dying race of tangible libraries.
We're actually that cool.
As a homeschooled kid, I didn't have a "first day of school" in a classroom until I was sixteen years old and a junior in high school. Naturally, the world of lockers, due dates, and seemingly pointless rules (I really can't chew gum and I HAVE to wear shoes?!) seemed exotic and adventurous to my eager self.
I remember the first time I sat down in a classroom. I set my books on the table, surveyed the class, did a double take, and made that epic, mortifying discovery many students have made: wrong classroom
My fair, freckled skin turned a bright rose and I scurried from the classroom, and eventually found the right classroom. I sat down with relief and tried to figure out what to do with my pen besides chew on it.
And I remember the first time I felt at home in a classroom. It was in Mrs. Huff's junior English class at Bob Jones Academy and we carted hardback American Lit books to the classrooms, where we sat with rapt attention and soaked in a world comprised of words, stories, themes, and brilliant authors. At least I did. I was in heaven. Three thousand miles away from my childhood home in bucolic fields of northern California, I had found a niche at a conservative Christian prep school in South Carolina. My peasant skirts, two toned Mary Janes, trendy, fitted zip up hoodies, and fly away curls set me apart from my immaculately attired peers. But my love and understand of Hawthorne, Poe, and Thoreau drew them to that smart girl from California--me.
I never wanted to leave Mrs. Huff's class. The bell that signified the end of the period was more like a funeral dirge for my eager mind. I wished for English class to happen six times a day.
It was then that I decided an English degree might be in my future.
My first semester of college started a semester later than I had always planned, as I stayed home to work the first semester.
It was much easier than my advisers warned, and my distracted self was delighted to turn in the weekly paper or project instead of the daily homework.
It was also not quite as fun as I had dreamed and vastly more expensive than I had ever imagined, and the idealistic teenager, who had dreamed of days of English classes slowly faded in the background.
Work became my passion, as I sought creative ways to pay exorbitant tuition rates.
Reading luxuriously, as I delved deeper into the works of the masters, and thinking inquisitively and ingeniously became a privilege of the past. Homework was something done quickly when there was a spare moment, papers written furiously--with no thought given of impressing the professor. Completion and and a reasonable grade became my goal. I began to wonder why I had ever decided to major in English. Where was my future?
It was Milton who brought me back. Milton and my hefty anthology of African American literature. I'd studied Paradise Lost in high school, and liked it as well as any seventeen year old with a knack for reading and a penchant for literary analysis. In my upper division classes college class, however, Milton was explored in a bright array of different lights. He was peeled back contextually, challenged theologically, and I carried Paradise Lost in my right hand and the Cambridge Companion to Milton in my left. I began to feel as if I knew and understood Milton--or at least a tiny facet of his mind. The Milton of my high school English classes was just snippet of the Milton of my Seventeenth Century British Authors class, which of course barely tapped the surface of the gold mine of Milton genius.
I gazed at my anthologies and dreamed of the day I could share these fascinating ideas with my high school students, people who existed clearly and vividly in my mind's eye.
I began to feel a kinship with that sixteen that felt at home in Mrs. Huff's English class.
But it wasn't just the author who penned an epic work while blind, who rekindled my love affair with English classes. It was the courageous, articulate, and passionate authors found within the pages of my chunky, dilapidated copy of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. I discovered the authors living in those pages numbered more than Washington and DuBois, but as I read those two in context, I admired their skill, the quality of their debate, and the hopes they imbued in their writing. I met Equiano, Wheatley, McKay, and Hansberry and became instant fans of their spirit, erudition and passion. I ached to become Locke's student and dissect his works. I listened to the cries of Malcolm X. and Dr. King, and pondered why history moved so slowly in some areas of freedom. I cried with Morrison,heard Angelou sing, and realized that the span and depth of American literature was much deeper and richer than Realists versus Transcendentalists. I ached to share this new found knowledge with younger members of my generation and future generations.
Suddenly, my syllabi became a launching point for lectures that I would pontificate upon to my future students. Daily experiences became anecdotes to be shared with bored high school students on an off day. The spark that had been kindled in my sixteen year old heart and mind became a crimson and orange wildfire in my jaded college student heart.
I remembered why I wanted to major in English, to teach it, to insure that the works collected over the past hundreds of years remain intact and read by future generations. I majored in English because I love it. I will teach English because I am passionate about it. I will share it because erudition--in the sense of the writers who have helped shaped our history--is a worthy cause.
Yes, I chose a major everyone loves to mock as being a freeway to poverty--and rightly so. But because of my near-obsession not taking out loans, prowess in editing papers, and penchant for elucidating the the works of authors from Hawthorn to O'Connor to my confused peers, I'm well on my way to a career of dashing high school egos with a red pen.
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