The apprentice becomes the master.

On Thursday I was sitting in the AML, simultaneously acting as consultant (refilling the printers with paper, et cetera) and reading a text for my Space and Embodiment class on Tuesday. (A text that I have to present on, but that's beside my point.) There were also three of my students in the room I was sitting in, working on their collaborative research paper that was due to me the following day. They didn't need my help at all --the asked me like two questions about citing -- but I would periodically look up from Split Subjects, Not Atoms to sort of check on them. I was very mother-hen about this scenario. It just felt so good to watch the three of them sitting side by side, diligently working on a project I'd assigned to them. Occasionally it hits me how awesome it is to be an instructor.

It took me a while to notice this, but when it occurred to me, it hit me like a ton of bricks. My English 101 instructor, Rosemary (who is pregnant, yay!!), was also in this room, sitting on the opposite wall as my students. They're parallel to one another, their backs to each other. They obviously had no idea who the other is (or, the others are).

I realized this dichotomy, or coincidence, or whatever I should call it, and felt a wave of warm euphoria wash over me. I got up to sit next to Rosemary and told her my students were in here, and how funny it felt to be in this room with my students and my ex-instructor, simultaneously aware of my role as a past 101 student and a current 101 instructor.

It's amazing how things change, how life evolves, how you can be a student and a teacher, or a mother and a daughter, or even a friend and an enemy. It's amazing to me the binaries that exist in people, the dualities; how can we be one thing, and also be its opposite?

In short, it made me really happy. I owe so much to Rosemary -- I might not be in grad school today if I hadn't had English 101 with her when I was a sophomore in college. She pushed me so hard to forget that molecular biology crap (she's a smart one) and become an English major and if she hadn't urged me so insistently, I may never have looked at the Liberal Arts degrees offered and I may never have found DTC (which is a depressing thought) and then I may never have ended up where I am today, getting a Master's and teaching English 101.

It was so nice to be shocked into awareness of my past on this particular Thursday, and how my past has shaped my present, and I couldn't help but think about the ways they will both shape my future.

romantic ecology.

"They grew among the mossy stones, about and about them; some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness, and the rest tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake."

(From Dorothy Wordsworth's The Grasmere Journals.)

I love it I love it I love it I love it.