My Confession - Part 4

The weeks leading up to my departure for Nova Scotia were experienced with equal parts of excitement and dread.  I was excited to leave Brandon for something new, but I knew that it was going to be stressful adapting to a new environment.  I had no idea what my new living quarters would look like, as my brother had made all of the arrangements (I would be living with him and a friend of his in a trailer park a couple miles from the University).  I don't recall how I imagined it was going to be, but I do remember that when I did arrive, it was significantly different than I had expected.  We had to take a total of three planes and a two and a half hour bus ride to get to Antigonish, the small community where St. Francis Xavier is located.  This was at a time when I was smoking cigarettes, and it was the longest day of my life!  Until that point I hadn't had to forgo my fix for more than a couple hours, this was my first time enduring an entire day without a smoke, and I was none too happy.  I vividly recall the cigarette I enjoyed outside of Halifax airport, sitting on my luggage against the cement wall, along a sidewalk with my brother, waiting for the shuttle bus to arrive.

We arrived in Antigonish mid-evening, and took a cab from the bus depot to our trailer.  It is interesting to recall the vastness with which I perceived the small community, and its descending scale as I got to know the area.  Our trailer was the epitome of the middle of the line.  There were no luxuries, apart from the in-home washing machine and dryer.  The floors were mostly hardwood, in decent shape, with worn linoleum in the kitchen.  We didn't have television, but we did have the internet, a necessity for three University students living more than a quick jaunt from their school.  My brother and I had both agreed to let Jon take the master bedroom, and we each took one of the smaller rooms, about the size of a small dorm.  My brother had managed to acquire a couple of old cot sized mattresses to sleep on - Jon came from a community an hour away and brought with him his queen sized box spring and mattress, I think his bed was bigger than our respective rooms.  When I looked in my new bedroom, what greeted me was a worn mattress on the floor, a small flimsy desk with a wooden chair, and an empty wire rack for a shelving unit.  Home, sweet home.

My brother did a lot to make me feel welcome and comfortable.  My first days were particularly overwhelming, and he did his best to ease me into life in Antigonish.  The day we arrived, we walked around the town, stopping in at one of the pubs for a couple of pints - this was to become a very regular habit of mine, and easily consumed thousands of dollars of my student loan money.  He showed me the important locales, such as the Tim Hortons, and a convenience store where I could buy cigarettes.  The first week was registration and orientation - he showed me around the campus, and even waited with me in a couple of obscenely long registration lines.  Basically he made sure I knew what I was doing, and that I wasn't overwhelmed by the process, and I was very grateful for his being there.

The first week of classes was called "Frosh" week, and involved games, events, and contests for freshmen in the University.  Most first year students lived on campus in residence.  Each residence had a name, and was a team for the various events.  "Off campus" students formed a team as well, but I did not feel at all like participating.  I may as well have been in a different country speaking a different language.  All I saw were people who were feeling at home amongst the crowd.  I felt as though I were an intruder.  There was a kick-off picnic that my brother convinced me to go to for the free food.  I stood in a thicket of trees way off to the side of the field and watched people.  I wasn't too frightened to join in, I simply did not want to.  The activities seemed juvenile, and I did not want to be associated with the so-called "fun".  I sat by myself in the shade, picking blades of grass and chewing on the sweet, moist stems.  This was where I felt comfortable and content. 

Finally, after a very long week, classes began.  I took five courses to begin with, they were all six credit-hours (two-terms), as most first year classes are at St. Francis Xavier.  English was a given, as I was entering into a BA program.  I also took Intro to Philosophy, Intro to Psychology, World Religions and History of Christianity.  I was very lucky in all my classes to have the most sought after professors (there were at least two or three for each class, the more popular ones had as many as four or five).  I recall speaking with some other students about their classes with other professors, and being very relieved that I had by chance ended up where I was. 

My English professor was a brilliant young woman, specializing in Romantic literature.  Her post graduate work had been done at Oxford University, and it was immediately apparent to me that she was not your average professor.  She was contagiously enthusiastic, and very much outside of the box.  She encouraged original thought and creativity, and allowed a great deal of wiggle room when it came to selecting essay topics.  It was clear her primary goal was not to bog her students down with technical instruction and by the book analysis, but rather to inspire a love of literature and to expand the minds her students.

Philosophy was a particularly enjoyable class for me, and my professor absolutely made the experience far more fruitful than it could have been.  His lectures were engaging and invited a great deal of student interaction - he had been doing this for a very long time.  His knowledge of the philosophers we were to study was of course, impeccable, and he had a profound knack for elucidating the often confusing and rambling diatribes of Nietzche, Hume, and Descartes.  Surprisingly I found the easiest concepts to grasp were the oldest - Plato's Republic in particular was fascinating.  Hume, on the other hand was next to impossible to decipher, and it wasn't even a translated work.  In fact it was the only work we studied that was in its original language.  The papers I wrote for this class were by far the most difficult to assemble.  At one time I recall having twenty pages of notes laid out on the floor in front of me as I tried to organize arguments.  The easy B's of high school were long past, and my professors had particularly high standards of quality.  I worked very hard for the B's and A's I received in my year at University.

It was at this time that I began to realize my difficulty in learning from text.  It wasn't until much later that I learned that this too was associated with my spectrum traits.  I spent countless hours trying to read the texts required for class, and encountered unending frustration at my seeming inability to synthesize the information I was reading into manageable notes.  I seldom did the required reading in high school, depending largely on internet summaries for study material.  Elementary school and junior high reading was much easier, but even then I struggled with things like analyzing novels and stories, and breaking them down into their constituent elements.  I am unable to perceive the big picture when it comes to text.  Every new sentence pushes the previous sentence out of my mind, and the more I read, the more difficult it is to maintain a sense of continuity.  It is as if my mind is a table, and the book is a collection of puzzle pieces.  Rather than organize the pieces into a picture, my mind places them in a string, and as new pieces are added to the end, the pieces from the beginning are pushed off the surface, so a picture never forms.  I end up reading sections of text many times over before a concrete idea can form in my mind.  Needless to say, this method of learning is enormously inefficient, and due to the quantity of text to be digested, it simply was not going to work.

I had to solve this problem if I was going to be successful, and I began to get creative.  I had found that taking notes from lectures in class was very difficult, especially if the lectures were not distinctly organized.  If I took pause to make a note of something, my focus was diverted from the lecture just long enough to ruin the flow of speech.  I would get lost easily, and miss vital information in the process.  I was able to learn far more if I put down my pen, and focused on listening.  This was problematic too though, because despite my best efforts, there was plenty said that I could not later remember.  I solved this problem by purchasing a small digital recording device, and proceeded to record the lectures while I listened.  I took these recordings home, and made detailed notes, pausing the audio while I typed.  By doing this I ended up with a series of very thorough and organized notes that corresponded directly with our assigned readings.  I could also later reorganize the information, or add new information to previous topics.  Page references and indications of secondary reference material were embedded into the notes, which made studying for exams and finding quotes and references for papers a much more streamlined process. 

I used this method primarily for Philosophy and World Religions.  I spent two to three hours every day making these notes, and the payoff was huge.  My notes became a very popular resource at exam time.  This also largely solved my problem with completing the readings.  I still did the readings, but I concerned myself far less with what I was taking from them, and consequently experienced a great deal less frustration.   I do not think that I would be able to use the same method at a higher level though - it worked primarily because we were tested on the material as he had explained it. While there was a great deal of emphasis placed on the synthesis of this information and drawing our own conclusions, I did not have to rely on the texts themselves for my understanding of the concepts.

I did not deal with every problem that arose so proactively.  While recording lectures largely solved my difficulty with Philosophy and World Religion, allowing me to learn via a method that was suited to my particular needs, Intro to Psychology presented me with a difficulty that I decided, in a panic, to run away from.  I think part of the problem was the way in which the professor addressed us.  The way he communicated his expectations was something along the lines of "you aren't in high school anymore, get ready for a reality check."  This put me off kilter from the very beginning, I just felt as though I was somehow inadequate, or not up for the challenge.  When the first midterm rolled around, I looked through the review material and was stricken with self-doubt.  I had a week left before the drop date, and simply did not think I could keep up with all the information for this class, as well as maintain my success in the others, which were of greater importance to me.

The day before the mid-term, I sat down to study and had an overwhelming feeling of panic.  I stopped in my tracks, logged onto the University website, and dropped the course.  I could have written the exam, and still had a few days to drop the course if I did as poorly as I expected.  No one would have held it against me, it is a common occurrence for first year students to be overwhelmed.  I couldn't even face the prospect of writing the exam and doing poorly though, so I chickened out.  I was a rather engaged student in his class, and he was surprised to see that I had disappeared from the roster so unexpectedly.  He contacted me and asked what had happened, and I explained that I wasn't going to be able to keep up with the work, and that my other classes were a priority for me.  I think he had anticipated that I would do well, which I probably would have had I tried, but my fear of failure got the best of me.  He expressed some disappointment, and I applaud him for not treating me like a number, I am sure many professors in the same boat really wouldn't care.

So I was left with four classes instead of five and was refunded money for the course, which I promptly added to my beer and cigarette fund.  I felt regret for a while, but in the end it was probably an okay decision.  I still had plenty on my plate.

Tomorrow I will talk about the remaining two classes, World Religion and History of Christianity.  Two very different professors, with profoundly different philosophies.  They each had an incredible influence on how my thoughts on religion and spirituality developed in the following years.  While I learned a lot in English and Philosophy, my courses in religion helped me to grow as a human being, and were instrumental in establishment of my post-Christian beliefs.

Thanks to those that have taken the time to give me their thoughts and encouragement, you are greatly appreciated, and motivate me to continue to understand myself. 

Peace and sanity upon us!