Only Two More Days

Only two more days until a new adventure begins. Two more days until I face new challenges. Two more days until my first on-line writing class begins. And I am anxious. Not anxious as in excited and can hardly wait, but anxious as in nervous and second guessing myself. What in the world have I done to my life as I know it?

Signing up for the class was the right decision. I am certain of that, but it thrusts me into an arena that is foreign to me. Why I think that, I don't know. I have been writing this blog for one and one half years now, so writing is not foreign. Being instructed is the part I am unfamiliar with. It has been over twenty years since I sat in a classroom.

Twenty years ago is when I went back to school just because I wanted to. Well, that was sort of the reason. Actually, I was beginning to see more and more obituaries for people in their fifties, and realized if my husband died, I had no job training to fall back on. I was just a mom with three teenagers. It had been years since I had been a pre-med student at the University of Oregon. With two years of college behind me, I could dissect a fetal pig, a cat, and a dogfish shark. I could identify different embryos by examining their colorfully stained slides. I could understand and read a little bit of German. AND I could reload the milk machine in the college dining room where I worked. That was all I had to offer the work-a-day-world.

Feeling that more schooling was needed, I enrolled at a local community college. The anxiety I felt then was much more intense that what I am feeling today. In those days, I was nervous about many things, although I didn't let anyone know what I was feeling. First off, I was nervous about taking math and English placement tests. Would I end up in remedial classes? I hoped not. I didn't.

The idea of a regular algebra class didn't bother me since I loved math, but English was another story. With math, your answers are either right or wrong. There is no way my interpretation of 3 + 4 will give me any answer but 7. Algebra 101 would pose no problem, Now writing an essay explaining how to do something is, in my mind, filled with booby traps. Choosing the best nouns and verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and verb tenses had me shaking in my boots. Could I write well enough to pass the class? Only time would tell.

Accounting and Biology classes also didn't pose much of a threat to me either, but Anthropology was somewhat scary. Let's talk about scary for a minute. Scary was realizing my 50 plus year old brain would be in the same classrooms with teens and twenty year old students--youth vs middle age. Well, let me tell you this. There was no competition. The wisdom and maturity of age left youth in the dust. A few weeks of school left anxiety in the dust. I loved every minute in the classroom. I loved studying for and taking the tests. Even doing research for my Anthropology paper on the Mound Builders  of the central U.S. was great fun.

And the class I dreaded the most--English 101? The very first paper I wrote, an in-class essay, came back covered with red ink and a big, ugly, staring-me-in-the-face C minus!  Not a plain old C. Not a C plus. It was a C minus. I had never in my life gotten a C in anything. I was shocked. How in the world could that have happened?

As I sat in my desk, on the verge of tears, the instructor said words that changed everything. "As long as any of you are willing to rewrite, I am willing to re-read and re-grade. Thus our journey began. With every paper I wrote, I ultimately rewrote, edited and re-edited as the instructor read, re-read, and re-graded until an A plus was achieved.  When the quarter ended, I realized that, surprisingly, English 101 was my favorite class. It was the one I worked the hardest in, and learned the most from.

So why am I now anxious about a beginning writing class? Part of it is not having a professor I see, hear, and talk to. Everything will be through electronic lessons and assignments, electronic questions and answers. Two more days. Two more days until I face the music--new music, different music. I hope I can still dance.

Trusting the Lord in this new adventure,
Jan