The Accidental Student, Part 1: Deja Vu

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One of the perks of working at my university is that employees are eligible to take classes without having to pay tuition. We only have to pay the incidental charges and buy our own books and supplies. We can take up to a certain amount of credits. Over and above that, we have to pay like everyone else.

The only catch is that we have to apply and be accepted into the university. This university’s undergraduate schools turn down about 70 percent of their applicants. I got around that by applying through the School of Continuing Education. They aren’t as choosy, probably because by the time most of us are eligible to apply through them most of us don’t want to even think about school anymore, so they don’t have nearly as many of us to choose from. The transcripts from the schools where I got my B.A. and M.A. look pretty good, so I slid in easily. My undergraduate transcript was a copy of the original, which was probably typed on an old electric typewriter back in 1968. It practically shouted, “Old, moldy, dusty archive.” I could make a joke about myself, but I refuse to go there.

You can imagine the excitement of a new employee at the thought of taking a class at an Ivy League school for a mere $200 and change. The list of classes looks like a smorgasbord:

Creative writing! Yes! My absolute passion! I HAVE to take this!
Italian! Sì, sicuro!
Ooh! Ancient history!
Ooh! Spanish!
Math? I wonder if they offer algebra for non-evolved brains. Probably not. Anyway, I hate math.
Engineering? You have to be kidding! I can put a piece of furniture together without having too many pieces left over, but that’s the extent of my engineering skills.

Two semesters in a row I try to register for a beginning fiction writing workshop, and two semesters in a row everyone else beats me to it and the classes are filled. Everyone wants to be a fiction writer. Rather than waste all that free tuition, I register, instead, for intermediate Italian.

The first thing I notice when I show up for the first class is that I’m the oldest living thing in the room. The other students are all undergraduate whippersnappers. The professor looks like he isn’t much older than the students. He’s a native Italian, which helps a lot when you’re trying to teach Italian. By the end of the first class, I have more or less gotten over the feeling of being the last rose of summer in a garden full of newly sprouted seeds, and I’m ready to settle into being a scholar.

Oh, but wait! What’s this? We’re going to have quizzes, a midterm, oral presentations and a final! This class is supposed to be a fun learning experience, but it’s going to be work, just like all those classes I took to get my degrees way back … uh oh! I forgot about all that! Well, nobody can say that Kathy Minicozzi is a quitter! I set out to take this class, and dammit I am going to finish it, unless it finishes me first! The honor of the Minicozzi family and all our ancestors is at stake.

But quizzes, midterms, presentations and finals? Mamma mia! Che si può fare?

I got a B+ in the class. I would have gotten an A, but I had trouble with a couple of the verb tenses. That’s what you get for studying a language that is a prettier-sounding form of Latin. The Italians were smart enough to get rid of the most complicated Latin grammar, but they kept some of it for old time’s sake. Students over the centuries have struggled accordingly, one of the last of them being me.