School has now started in most places, and I am celebrating my
27th anniversary of not having to go back.
School has now started in most places, and I am celebrating my 27th anniversary of not having to go back.
Twenty-seven years ago this fall I went back for my second year of grad school with all the anxiety and anticipation it entailed.
Don’t get me wrong; I think education is a great thing, and I’m grateful I got to go to good high schools and a great university. I still like to browse the school supply aisles and pick up a few nifty notebooks and bright markers.
I’m just glad I don’t have to actually go back to school.
Once the school year started and I settled into the routine, I was OK. But, for various reasons, the actual beginning of each school year filled me with dread.
Going into ninth grade, for example, I went from a five-year, 75-student high school in Illinois, (yes, 75 students total, 25 per class) to a junior high in Pacific Palisades with thousands of students.
Not only was that scary, but also I was going from an old-fashioned, three-story, rectilinear building with classrooms and lockers along its three corridors and a staircase at each end, to a sprawling open-plan campus with no discernible logic to its layout. I had nightmares for years about trying to find my way to class.
We moved back to Illinois for the second semester, and then that summer I was presented with the first of several summer reading lists. Since I come from a long line of procrastinators, I dawdled getting started and was still making plans for the grand burst of catch-up reading when school started again in the fall.
It also seemed that while shopping for school supplies was fun, getting them all organized along with the correct books and so forth was just designed to make me nervous.
And as I got older the question of what to wear loomed larger and larger. Even when I pored over Seventeen magazine all summer, I never really felt I got my look together. And, in those days in the early ’60s, there were already a few proto-hippies around whose dark clothes and subversive attitudes made me wonder if Seventeen magazine knew what it was talking about.
There was also the anxiety of never being sure, when I got to the bus stop and nobody was there, whether I was early or had missed it completely.
Luckily for me, my school anxieties didn’t keep me from loving to learn. I never really learned to annotate a term paper or do chemistry experiments (I never even learned to get the bunsen burner to light), I never learned to make welds that stuck, I never made it through more than five lines of iambic pentameter without falling asleep, and I still can’t remember if it’s credits by the window and debits by the door or the other way around.
But I survived my anxieties every fall, and every year I found at least one thing – not always in the classroom – to love that spurred me onward to keep trying to understand how the world works.
