musings from a nostalgic former mime

I was a twelve-year old mime. Because when you’re homeschooled and in that horribly awkward, angsty middle-school stage, and you really don’t have tons of friends because (let’s be honest) you’re a bit “unique,” and you’d rather wear long dresses from Jane Austen’s time period than anything that was in style at any point during the last three centuries, clearly the best way to up your coolness points is to join a mime troupe.

So a bunch of homeschoolers got together at a church every Monday morning, and we practiced getting stuck behind invisible walls.

As exciting as that sounds, I would come home from mime practice every week frustrated. People weren’t listening to the teacher. Now, I’m not the firstborn. I’m not really even a strong type-A personality. But whenever the giggly girls in the back were being disruptive, the whole group got reprimanded. Week after week, we got the same lecture, and I was getting sick of it. Whenever I heard the other kids talking, completely ignoring the teacher, I wanted to ask them if they were actually aware of what the word mime meant, apparently operating under the assumption that saying “Shut up!” isn’t nearly as effective as referencing the dictionary.

Looking back, I needed to lighten up. Instead, I wrote the teacher. That’s a whole ‘nother story, but it actually helped the class situation. Unfortunately, the end result was that I wasn’t the most popular kid in the mime troupe. And when you’re the least popular one in a mime troupe, you know it’s bad.

I am so glad I’m not twelve years old anymore. Or a mime.

But I stuck it out until the end of the year, and I distinctly remember our last performance. The whole week had been full of extra rehearsals and practices. We’d performed at a nursing home and a church already. Now, we were the opening act for an award-winning ventriloquist performing at the largest auditorium in our county.

Maybe being a mime wasn’t so bad after all.

Anyway, the excitement and nerves that I shared that one week with my fellow mimes changed something. I was having fun. We were bonding. And at the end of our last performance, as we stood there in our striped shirts and suspenders, washing off our white faces for the last time, we all started feeling nostalgic. Promises of “we’ll all be back together next year” echoed through the room.

And I went home and told my mom that I wanted to do mime again next year. Being the wise person she was, she told me to wait and see how I felt in the fall.

It only took a few weeks to make my decision. Mime? Um, no. Never again.

I don’t know why, but nostalgia hits me at weird times, in weird places, and about weird things that I never really liked in the first place.

So here I am, about to enter into my last week of freshmen classes. And I’m feeling nostalgic. Immediately, I am suspicious. Is this just mime nostalgia all over again? I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last few weeks. It’s not. It’s nothing like mime. But the school librarians might prefer it if I worked a bit more on my mime-like qualities.

I am nostalgic about freshmen year in a good way. I’m not idealizing it. I don’t want to go back to the beginning of freshman year, or continue in a state of perpetual freshmanliness. (Freshmasculinity?) I want my robe and sophomore title. But freshman year has been awesome, and the end of awesome things is bittersweet.

I've learned that it's possible to read hundreds of pages in a day, and that it's possible to write papers overnight, but not advisable. And flannel and fleece PJ pants will be your best friends in the winter, but no matter how comfy your pajamas are, you shouldn't stay up all night in them writing papers. And you should definitely not do that twice. But on a more serious note...

I really don’t know how to describe it without sounding sappy, but worlds have been opened up to me. Things have clicked. I have a deeper understanding of God now, one that doesn’t rely on understanding alone. I’ve been encouraged, admonished, and loved by students and faculty who genuinely care about me.

Quintilian describes the perfect teacher, saying

Let him adopt a paternal attitude towards his pupils, and regard himself as taking the place of those whose children are entrusted to him. Let him be free of vice himself and intolerant of it in others. Let him be strict but not grim, and friendly but not too relaxed, so as to incur neither hatred nor contempt. He should talk a great deal about what is good and honourable; the more often he has admonished his pupils the more rarely will he need to punish them. He must not be given to anger, but he must not turn a blind eye to things that need correction; he must be straightforward in his teaching, willing to work, persistent but not obsessive. He must answer questions readily, and put questions himself to those who do not ask any. In praising his pupils’ performances he must be neither grudging nor fulsome: the one produces dislike of the work, the other complacency. In correcting faults, he must not be biting and certainly not abusive. Many have been driven away from learning because some teachers rebuke pupils as though they hate them. He should himself deliver at least one speech, preferably several, a day, for his class to take away with them. For even if he provides them with plenty of examples for imitation from their reading, better nourishment comes, as they say, from the “living voice” and especially from a teacher whom, if they are properly taught, the pupils love and respect. It is difficult to overestimate how much readier we are to imitate those whom we like.

Those are my teachers.

And when students have teachers like that, they can't help but

love their teachers as they do their studies, and think of them as the parents not of their bodies but of their minds. This feeling of affection will do much for their studies. They will be ready to listen, have confidence in what is said, and want to be like the teacher; they will go to classes cheerfully and eagerly, they will not be angry when corrected, they will be pleased when they are praised, they will try to earn affection by their application. As the teachers’ business is to teach, so theirs is to make themselves teachable. Neither is sufficient without the other. And just as it takes two parents to produce a human being, and seed is scattered in vain if the ground has not been softened in advance to nurture it, so eloquence cannot develop unless teacher and learner work in harmony together.”

Quintilian and I had a tumultuous relationship, but he was spot on here.

I've been taught to appreciate God’s creation more…though my stubborn Floridian heart still resists the snow. I’ve rediscovered how awesome Latin is. I’ve learned that poetry isn’t stupid, and that there are some things that poetry alone can convey. Not only that, but I can actually write poetry. I used to think my poetry skills were confined to limericks and Dr. Seuss knock-offs. Goofy poetry. Then I wrote a serious poem. A sad poem. And my teacher liked it, and he asked me to read it again at Disputatio, but all that paled in comparison to my father’s response when I e-mailed him my poem. “Favorite poem ever,” he said. And maybe he only said that because I’m his daughter, but I don’t care, because I wrote it for him.

Tomorrow is Sunday. And so starts my last week of classes. Then a week of finals and then . . . home.

The speaker at Convocation told us freshman year would be like Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. I didn't make it to Disney before they closed the ride, but if Mr. Toad's Wild Ride was anything like freshman year, I think I would have liked it.


Freshman books...