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Luke Jordan Lyman Barner Dr. Lauren Mason ENGL 1101H 11 October 2013 The First Day of ENGL 1101 Where does adulthood start? The line in the sand that my parents and their parents drew for their children was the first day of college. Not an arbitrarily-chosen birthday, not a demonstration of maturity, but that age-old rite of passage that communicates your skill, work ethic, responsibility, and ownership of what your elders spoon-fed you. What a joke, I’m sure I thought, as I skipped numerous orientation events that I had decided were totally irrelevant to me. The first day of college was a testament to my new ability to ignore what I was told. Instructions seemed obsolete, and suggestions disguised as something more forceful were what took their place. I hadn’t met my professors yet, but I couldn’t picture them as anything but the same as the event leaders and RA’s that we’d met that gave all of those platitude-saturated welcome speeches I’d tuned out in favor of extra sleep or maybe time with a girl I’d had a little success with over the weekend. I was looking forward to the free time I’d acquire by efficient study and absence from classes when it suited me. College professors didn’t know or care when a student was missing, or so I was told. That must have been what adulthood was about, I’d figured—handling your own time and energy, not waiting for instructions and not being penalized for stepping outside of petty boundaries meant for someone with less common sense.
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That first class thoroughly confused me. There were dozens of chairs in the classroom, but only sixteen or seventeen students. Dr. Mason didn’t give the impression of having incredibly early senility or blindness, so there was absolutely no way I could be missing from the class without it being noted, yet it didn’t seem like she’d care if I did. As she began to talk to us about our resources and responsibilities in the class, I got the sense that what she was really saying was “I don’t care what grade you get, but you have to come and get it.” I could already tell this was going to be a more demanding class than my others, but it looked nothing like my preconception of a college class. I expected grading rubrics and clear expectations to meet, like in high school, or maybe a larger college class, but nearly all of our assignments were essays and papers, and looked like they were subject to Dr. Mason’s opinion of our work. Instead of tests with questions with point values, we had to demonstrate true comprehension of material, and even offer opinions on it. Was I supposed to figure out what she wanted and cater all of my assignments to that? My impression of my professor was that she was above that kind of pandering and would see through it if I tried. The class seemed immune to the ethic of “do the least amount of work possible to make the highest grade possible.” My notes quickly filled with sentences in all-capital letters and double and triple underlining. This was an awakening I would not have in my other classes, and I knew it. I wasn’t worried about keeping my GPA up in pre-calculus, history, or music, because I knew I could. This was an honors class, and I could tell from the get-go that I would have to treat it like one. Gone were the days of manipulating my way through my work. My parents couldn’t have guessed that I’d cross the threshold into being a more responsible person, maybe even an adult,
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in an English class, but there I was. I probably didn’t process it all the way until days or weeks later, but that first day in English set the tempo for the whole start of the semester. It illustrated the value of getting work done, not for fear of the consequences, but for the end reward. These things started to bleed into the work I did in other classes, not because I forced them to, but because it became the natural way I did things.