First Days of School: The Pierce Curse Is Back

I survived the first two days of school. There were a couple of moments, though, in which I thought that I might not make it through.

Day One

First of all, I'm used to English majors. It, frankly, is going to take me a little while to get used to all of the Bible majors, though I'm sure it will happen, and will be good. But for now...

What happened is this. I was in my first class, Introduction to the Old Testament. We were supposed to talk to the person next to us for exactly four minutes and tell them about yourself and include a meaningful experience from the last summer. Then, that person was going to introduce us to the rest of the class.

So, I talked to the fellow next to me. I couldn't think of much of anything that I wanted to be told to forty strangers, so I said that I'd made the final decision to come back to grad school at ACU. He asked why I'd done it. I told him that there were a lot of reasons for my decision. I explained to him some of them, one being something that I did a post on back in January. That is, I told him, I had sensed in my freshman students back at Tech that their primary obstacle to learning (which is what I was concerned about) was a tragic vacuum of meaning. They had no sense of truth or of any sense that it should or could be pursued at all. The most they could imagine of gaining from their educations was a higher paycheck. I, therefore, felt that there was little use in teaching language until they had could grasp a larger meaning for their presences in the classroom. I basically told the grad student that, in almost exactly those words. I was here, in part to learn how to convey a sense of meaning to people.

So, we got to the introductions, and the guy who was introducing me told my little introduction like this: "John did his undergrad at ACU and did a Masters at Texas Tech. While he was there, he learned that his students knew everything already about language. What they didn't know about, he found, was they didn't know their savior Jesus Christ. So he's here."

I cringed and cringed and cringed. I would have curled up in the fetal position from the pain, except that I had to introduce him, which I did very quickly so that maybe, I hoped, people would forget the introduction of me. That was really one of the more painful moments of my life. I'm overly sensitive, I'm afraid, to sentimentalism, and that was some dang powerful sentimentalism that this fellow put in my mouth. It did not taste good. The professor gave me a funny look.

I also found out that I'm 170+ pages behind in reading for that class. Not that anybody could have been caught up. The professor in there assigned reading for the first day of class, even though nobody was going to get the syllabus until that day. We'll just have to make it up.

Day Two

I had to wake up at 7:00. I'm no good that early in the morning, so I've always avoided 8:00 classes. I couldn't avoid one this year though. Despite being too sick to eat anything that early, though, that class went ok.

Except that I'm about 50 pages behind in there. Same trick as the first professor.

It was the next class, Greek, that really got me. Evidently, three weeks ago, this professor sent out an email to the class, saying that we should memorize the Greek alphabet and pronunciation and read the first chapter of our book by the first day of class.

Guess who never got this email. Me, of course. There were several people who never had gotten the email, but most of the others had had Greek as undergrads, and so they remembered the alphabet, if nothing else. I, of course, had never seen a Greek alphabet. It was sort of difficult to write my memorized Greek alphabet on the board in front of everyone not having ever seen it. That sucked.

All in all, though, the first two days of classes didn't go as badly as I had expected. That's the great thing about being a pessimist, I guess. I think I'll survive, just barely.