Entrance to the Profession Narrative :: Essays Papers

Entrance to the Profession Narrative I remember seventh grade Open House at my suburban Catholic grade school in the southern curve of St. Louis’ Mississippi River. I remember the glaring, bowl-shaped auditorium lights hovering over milling parents and sheepish classmates, everyone looking for their own, or their own child’s work so they could make their exclamations and get on with the night. I remember it so well because on my orange poster-board balloon, under a fifth grade school photo—with the red pullover sweater, plaid Peter Pan collar, and bouffant bow—someone had written â€Å"Aspiring Author.† I didn’t know anyone knew. I didn’t even know myself. Maybe it was in the stories I wrote for our weekly vocabulary sentences. Or the dramas I enacted for book reports that ran fifteen minutes over our allotted five. Perhaps I revealed it in my Social Studies notebook with pages upon pages of illustrated, full-paragraphed definitions of Civil War details, in the three-page poem I recited from memory in front of the class, in zealous literature projects, in my natural ability to crank out grammar trees, or in the novella I turned in for a one-page writing assignment. It never occurred to me to articulate such an aspiration—perhaps because it was too close. But others could see it—this love affair with language. For whatever reasons, I continued to dismiss that orange balloon discovery until several years after I left—I thought—the academic world behind for good. I understand now why my undergraduate years were such a struggle. This bouffant-bowed aspirant hooked flailing arms around a biology major, when math and science had been only sources of tedium and misery. After a year of unbearable classes, I switched my major to English—more out of a sense of failure than a sense of right. My motivation for grasping onto science was the thought of a clear, and perhaps interesting, job-title after four years. My motivation for running back into the arms of my former lover was that it felt familiar and natural. I cringed every time I heard someone say, â€Å"Oh, an English major†¦what will you do? Teach?† Was that my only option? I couldn’t do it. Yes, I loved to read and write, to crawl into glittering tunnels of analysis, to discover ideas as they revealed themselves under my pen, but it all seemed so†¦removed from life. Entrance to the Profession Narrative :: Essays Papers Entrance to the Profession Narrative I remember seventh grade Open House at my suburban Catholic grade school in the southern curve of St. Louis’ Mississippi River. I remember the glaring, bowl-shaped auditorium lights hovering over milling parents and sheepish classmates, everyone looking for their own, or their own child’s work so they could make their exclamations and get on with the night. I remember it so well because on my orange poster-board balloon, under a fifth grade school photo—with the red pullover sweater, plaid Peter Pan collar, and bouffant bow—someone had written â€Å"Aspiring Author.† I didn’t know anyone knew. I didn’t even know myself. Maybe it was in the stories I wrote for our weekly vocabulary sentences. Or the dramas I enacted for book reports that ran fifteen minutes over our allotted five. Perhaps I revealed it in my Social Studies notebook with pages upon pages of illustrated, full-paragraphed definitions of Civil War details, in the three-page poem I recited from memory in front of the class, in zealous literature projects, in my natural ability to crank out grammar trees, or in the novella I turned in for a one-page writing assignment. It never occurred to me to articulate such an aspiration—perhaps because it was too close. But others could see it—this love affair with language. For whatever reasons, I continued to dismiss that orange balloon discovery until several years after I left—I thought—the academic world behind for good. I understand now why my undergraduate years were such a struggle. This bouffant-bowed aspirant hooked flailing arms around a biology major, when math and science had been only sources of tedium and misery. After a year of unbearable classes, I switched my major to English—more out of a sense of failure than a sense of right. My motivation for grasping onto science was the thought of a clear, and perhaps interesting, job-title after four years. My motivation for running back into the arms of my former lover was that it felt familiar and natural. I cringed every time I heard someone say, â€Å"Oh, an English major†¦what will you do? Teach?† Was that my only option? I couldn’t do it. Yes, I loved to read and write, to crawl into glittering tunnels of analysis, to discover ideas as they revealed themselves under my pen, but it all seemed so†¦removed from life.