Professor X Read Online Free PDF Page B

children’s tale by a woman of seventy. . . .” That was how I felt. My sense of fitness was disturbed. I was too old for this. All of my life seemed askew.
    â€œLet’s see who’s here, shall we?” I murmured. Shall we! That was my first British Lit teacher.
    I took attendance. I asked the students about their majors, about why they were taking the class, and got essentially the same answers that I was to get in every class from then on. Two young men in baseball caps who appeared to be friendly already were getting degrees in criminal justice. Both were planning to make the law enforcement rounds, taking the state trooper exams for several nearby states. Julie, a young woman with a gentle voice, clad in pink scrubs and electric-green clogs, planned to work in pediatric oncology. I told her I thought that sounded like depressing work. (Perched on the edge of my desk, I found myself sliding right into college professor mode, holding forth with instant opinions about everything.) She said that yes, it could be sad, but there was lots of opportunity there, and really, wasn’t all nursing quite sad when it wasn’t very happy? Julie had a considered philosophy and put me in my place rather nicely. Several teacher’s aides were studying to be teachers. One middle-aged woman had a strong Spanish accent; she revealed that this was her first college class, and admitted, with abject deference, that she was very, very nervous. She did look terrified. “We’ll try to see that it’s not your last,” I said, trying to sound warm and vaguely self-deprecating. The class applauded her. “You’ll do fine,” someone said.
    At that moment I marveled at just how good one human being could be to another.
    There were a few other students hovering around my own age. One woman wore an oxford cloth shirt and a thin summer cardigan; the sleeves of her shirt were rolled halfway up, revealing tattoos on both forearms. Her children were out of the house, she said, and she was now following her dream of a career in public relations. Next to her was a Saturn mechanic in one of his mechanic’s shirts, with his name embroidered in script above the pocket. And there was a hulking building contractor, too big for his desk, who looked like a parent sitting at his kid’s school’s open-house night.
    Oh, that innocent, Edenic first class! For at that moment I felt nothing but affection and admiration for the students. Here was a cross section of the citizenry with one thing in common: the desire to better their situations. How great a country were we living in that such dreams of academic salvation could be realized? On that night, the American sense of possibility seemed our greatest national characteristic. The women’s rights movement, the civil rights movement, the seniors’ rights movement all had simmered and bubbled and come to a full rolling boil over thirty years, and what was once the exception was now the rule: everyone, it seemed, either went to college or went back to college to fulfill their dreams. I took my hat off to them. They’d been working all day; I knew they were tired. I was tired. The classroom, having been used all day by the full-time students, was a demoralizing mess. Candy wrappers littered the aisles. Julie the nurse ate a tuna and bean sprout sandwich; she perched the wrappings daintily atop a garbage can filled to overflowing. On the blackboard ledges sat small dunes of chalk dust that eddied about when the classroom door was opened; by night’s end, I would look as though I had been involved in some sort of toxic cleanup.

    â€œLet’s talk about writing for a moment,” I said.
    We talked, or rather I talked at them, for an hour. I had a sense that perhaps no one had ever addressed for them the emotional component of writing.
    â€œI’m a writing teacher, yes, but I’m also a writer,” I told them, and a case could be made