My First Day of School

Monday was my first day of school. For those of you who can't read the sentence above, I'm taking prerequisites to get into an accelerated nursing program. And by "prerequisites," I mean, "one class a semester for the next 2 1/2 years or until I get off this kick and drop out."

Anyway, I got to class with a pinched lower back from my two gigantic textbooks OHMIGOD I'm already too old and decrepit for this. I last took a college class in 1997, back when the interweb was a fancy thing at the university library. I'd seen in the movies that classrooms are now full of savvy young people clickity clacking their notes away on their laptops, and I worried I might have to also lug that around all day. But—and here's the takeaway for anyone considering classes at Big Ole City Community College—that's not the case. The class is about 25 people, all aspiring nurses or paramedics, most of whom seemed to have remembered paper. Turns out I also didn't need to bring my books, but that's neither here nor there.

We had a substitute, a skinny, pale, fidgety "scientist" send from Central Casting. He spent an hour reading us our syllabus out loud, then released us for a hard-earned break. After that, it was another hour of random scientificish anecdotes having something to do with the distance between him and another student and how we'd measure that and what if one of their belts was lower than the other, I think. It was very disorganized, but to be fair, it wasn't his job and no one was making eye contact with him. Then we got another break, and then class ended. The student on one side of me furiously scribbled notes listing wedding guests and their contact information; the guy next to me wrote absolutely nothing down. I asked him if I could copy his notes from the session and he laughed. A few minutes later, he asked if I was serious. The Wedding Planner, outraged at the nerve of our teacher to not show up, left during the first break. Captain No-Notes stuck around long enough to sign the attendance sheet, then left during the second.

I passed the time the same way I did during my first bout of college, which lasted a backbreaking 3 1/2 years and netted me an elbow grease-stained BA in Film Studies: I drew a series of tiny boxes on my notebook and allowed myself to fill one in every 15 minutes. As time goes on and my already-frail attention span wanes, these will likely multiply into boxes for every 5 and then 1 minutes. I wonder if I'll get an iPhone so I have something to do in class.