Out of the searing, swampy tedium of the past summer months comes a new horror: the beginning of the autumn semester at The University of Arizona. In just a few weeks, I will walk into classrooms in which my freshmen charges will be arranged in rows like the lazy, hormone-addled turnips they are. I will be saddled with the impossible task of shining the light of learning into the undifferentiated pulp of their vegetable minds.
The semester will follow the same progression as semesters past. My students will initially be on their best behavior -- the best behavior they are capable of, that is -- until they sniff out how strict or officious I am likely to be. After shopping composition instructors during the "Drop / Add" period, they will then begin to indulge their various vices -- almost hostile indifference, childlike restlessness and inattentiveness, chronic absence, near-illiteracy, and so on. The most discouraging fact, for me or any other composition instructor, is that we know thoroughly and completely what to expect, and yet we are powerless to change anything about what will come to pass in the next sixteen weeks. It is as if we composition instructors are condemned inmates who somehow miraculously survived the first attempt at our execution, but, instead of a pardon for enduring what we endured, we are told that the sentence must be carried out in a second attempt. We are back in that same corridor, having just enjoyed our final meal for a second time; the same priest walks beside us, mouthing prayers and benedictions, and we glimpse once again at the end of the now familiar corridor, in a dim brick room, a utility closet of death, the instrument of our demise awaiting us as expectant pie-faced gawkers look on.
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