If you don't, or never did, experience some form of disequilibrium before the start of a school term, especially college, I call you lucky. At the start of every college semester, I have always dealt with jitteriness in some form or other, and for me it meant riding the beast until it worked itself out. Not always pleasant, but it wasn't ever fatal, either.
When I was an undergraduate student, I think I'd be wide-awake for mostly happy reasons. A thrill of uncertainty: would this or that class be as good as I hoped? Would the subject matter be harder than I expected? Where would my mind and imagination get to be taken on an adventure? Would any of my teachers hold the kinds of high expectations that would require me to study furiously for a month in order to pass their exams like that one really awesome but totally sadistic constitutional law professor?
When I turned into a grad student the situation, appropriately enough, became more complicated. I think my very first grad school semester nerves were basically benign, maybe a slightly heightened form of undergrad nerves, for I then had No Idea What I Was Getting Myself Into. New school, new location, new teachers, new peeps. But what an adventure - whoopee!
But two things made matters more complicated in grad school.
One was the massively increased standards of performance, and massively more difficult course work. Naturally I vaguely expected things to be harder, but I was utterly a priori unprepared for just what that meant. Grad school - at least, the ones I attended - is to undergrad ... well, I'd say like night to day but I don't even know if that's a right comparison. I don't know that there's an adequate way to phrase out the comparison. It didn't just rock my boat; it flipped the boat overboard and threw me out. However hard I worked as an undergrad was nothing - I mean, NOTHING - compared to what I needed to do just to tread water in grad school.
It wasn't enough to peruse over the material before the start of classes. The classes begun expecting you to be familiar with that, and much more besides. I'd go to the library and check out all kinds of secondary material, and read, read, read. And it never seemed to be enough. Thence started, like clockwork, at the beginning of each and every grad school term The Pattern.
First: manically prepare before the start of classes. Second: experience the first week of classes where I'd invariably feel completely in over my head, utterly out of my element, like my teachers were talking an entirely different language. Third: a VERY unpleasant 2 or 3-day period where I'd lock myself in my apartment and have a mini-meltdown. I'd sob at the sensation of being completely insufficient. I was torn apart by feeling both so eminently fortunate to be in whatever fantastic space I was - the institution, the awesome teachers, the great location - while simultaneously being certain that I had gotten there by some gigantic cosmic mistake because I was clearly the biggest dumbass on campus and I must have fooled someone real good to have tricked the powers that be to let me in.
Then classes would start again I'd hitch myself up, and get back to it. and it would turn out all good. I don't know WHY on earth, for as long as I was taking graduate-level classes, I'd have my mini-nervous-breakdowns. But I did. But I didn't let them have me. i mean, I let them run their course, and although I wouldn't have used the language then, was present to them. However I was processing it, it seemed better to let it out, to let it go, than to repress it or bottle it up or try and ignore it. And I think I managed to keep confidence in the small voice in the back of my mind that all the while calmly and quietly maintained that of course I was good enough, that my being where I was wasn't a huge mistake, so that after my psychic flu ran its course, I had something positive left there to work from.
If that weren't enough, a second thing complicating grad school was starting in on the extraordinarily difficult task of learning how to teach, when the opportunity presented itself while being a teaching assistant. That was a whole new bag of challenges and, sometimes, horrors. Grading - oh my god - who knew how difficult that was? Standing up and talking in front of a classroom - who knew how nerve racking that was? All my teachers had made it look so easy! Ha!
The nervousness with teaching paled in comparison to the angst I had about classes when I was a grad student. But it returned to the forefront after I gathered up all the sheepskins I could and it was time to take the training wheels off and go at it on my own. Yay! More insomnia the night before the start of classes.
Of course there is usually excitement. A new semester! New sets of students! Maybe a brand-spanking new course to teach! New adventures!
But then too there were worries. Would I walk in on the first day and get hit with stage fright (yes, I always did) - and if so, would I manage to work through it (yes, I did)? What if I got a challenging class - did I have enough tricks in my arsenal to charge it back to life? Did I prep enough? For believe me, for any teacher worth his or her salt, for any single thing assigned to a student to read and evaluate, the teacher has read 10 or 20 things more, for insight, for seeing the material from a different angle, to have background, to have tools to try and explain a difficult idea more clearly to a confused audience. Did I arrange my syllabus fairly? is the workload too high? Should I have put more things on reserve? Did I give enough assignments? Did I leave myself room in there to have a some semblance of a life without becoming utterly submerged in grading and prep? Would, in spite of everything I tried to do to make the challenging material interesting and relevant and my standards and grading fair, I be stigmatized as tyrannical or uncompromising or incompetent? Do I have enough clothes so that it doesn't look like I'm wearing the same thing every day? Damn, I should have gotten that cool pair of shoes. .... and so on.
So there you have it. Maybe I am a little weird for always having pre-semester nerves, but I don't think I'm especially weirder than the average bear for it. Just as long as the nerves don't have you, it's all good.
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