You Aren't What You Read: Part I

“Prof. S., can I have a word with you privately?” I asked with what I hoped was quiet dignity.

It was during the break of English 210, my American Literature class.

I trembled in anticipation of this conversation, one that would soon set me apart from all the other students. Isn’t that what I wanted? To have a legitimate excuse for my poor performance on the reading quiz?

Retiring to a space behind his desk, I shared in the lowest of tones, “I want you to know that I have…a disability. My performance in the class is going to be somewhat…patchy.”

Prof S. listened professionally, nodding at appropriate intervals as I shared that I would probably perform better on the take home assignments than I would on the reading because I had, again in whispers, memory deficits.

It was a blatant case of TMI, but I didn’t think my ego could handle a professor thinking I was merely stupid. I was merely operating under a curse of stupidity.

Prof. S. responded perfectly, advising me to go through Disabled Student Services to see if I could get more time to take in class tests, etc. He also suggested using SQ3R, a reading method that, as I interpreted it, required that you basically live with the text strapped to your body at all times.

This experience really wasn’t what I had had in mind.

See, this summer, I thought I would do something mind/life expanding and take a community college class. I thought it would be good practice for me to see if I was a candidate for graduate school, a way to ease into things. Put the big toe in the pool at the shallow end. Read some cool stuff. Meet some people. So, I enrolled in English 210, the study of early American literature.

I thought I’d be blissfully reading The Scarlet Letter in the cushy folds of my duvet. Instead, I was slogging through pages and pages of boring early American exploration narratives taken from a five pound tome called The Bedford Anthology of American Literature with tissue-paper thin pages. In addition, I had to read a bunch of Native American creation myths that blended together into an incoherent blob in my mind. And how was I to remember names like Wammeset and Wampinoag? It was flatly unreasonable.

But this class was deadly serious business; Prof. S. insisted on describing all this as LIHTRACHUH in his sonorous voice and administering brutally detailed reading quizzes.

So what I thought would be a kick in the pants was turning out to be was a royal kick in the ass.

When I enrolled, I was in denial. The truth was that since the days when I was a literature student at UCSD, my memory and retention of text, particularly unfamiliar and obscure text, had substantially eroded. It was not just that my mental faculties were on hiatus; to a certain extent they were just not there. As a result of many psychiatric episodes and the use of mind-blunting medications, I had undergone a version of mental amputation.

After the stressful conversation with my instructor, when I realized that the class was going to be a mammoth commitment of my time, energy, and would ultimately challenge one of my core deficits, my memory, I did what any intelligent disabled person would do: I decided to drop the class. After all, it was just a silly experiment anyway. It wasn’t fun, and therefore, of no value to me.

But then I did a mental double-take. What would it really mean to drop the class? It would mean that I couldn’t read, that I wouldn’t be able to read anything of literary importance ever again, that my cognitive faculties had shrunken to the size of a pea, that there was no hope of recovery. It would mean that I could not learn. Would never learn again. Would never be able to survive a graduate school program. Never.

Then there was the fact that I had developed a fondness for Prof. S. He was the King of Feedback. He had the masterful ability to take the most inane comment brought up by a student and rework it so that it sounded erudite. His brilliance massaged everything into cogent points.

He also was the King of Affirmation. When he first emphatically responded to one of my comments by saying, “good good,” I thought he meant my comment was good, when I learned later, “good good” merely meant, “uh huh.”

He was cool, and he was deadly earnest about the subject matter and ran an extremely tight ship.

Then there were the whippersnappers. I realized that some of them were not yet born when I graduated from high school, but that was part of the charm.

Was I really ready to quit? I felt like it was damned if I do and damned if I don’t. Drop the class: feel like a failure. Don’t drop the class: be a failure.

What was I to do?

to be cont...