On being a student again

While T teaches, I am auditing beginning French and taking four online undergraduate courses in a pre-speech language pathology program. Before starting my classes, I was apprehensive, for many reasons. I had a lot of questions. What will it be like to move from the social role of teacher to student? What if the classes are too hard? What if they are too easy? What if I decide I hate the field and have to scrap my plan? What will it be like to start school at the same time that I move to a new home in a new country? Will it be too much?

Now I'm developing answers to some of those questions. I thought that, as a former college instructor, I would be very critical of my own instructors. I am, but I am also much more sympathetic to them than I would have been at, say, 18 years of age, because I now have a much better understanding of how difficult their jobs are.

The classes are both too hard and too easy, in certain ways. Because I'm not sitting in a classroom (and maybe because I'm over 30 years old), retention of material is more difficult. Much of the material in three of the classes is review, making it easy but a bit boring. Anatomy and physiology is  kicking my butt. That class is teaching me that I cannot re-adopt my perfectionistic student habits. I cannot, for example, learn all of the material for the exam I'm taking tomorrow morning. I have been studying for a week. My brain will not memorize everything. I have to be okay with that.

I maintain that it is harder to be a student at 30 than at 18, despite all of the benefits that maturity bestows upon the older student. I see this most in French class, where a University professor who is about my age sits next to me, and we roll our eyes at each other as we try to make even the simplest of utterances in French, while the 20 year old American students in the class are clearly picking up on things more quickly than we are.

One final problem with being a student again is that these classes are not taking up enough of my time. Why is that a problem? Because I haven't yet figured out how to fill the time not taken up by classes. Even laundry, which seems like a ridiculously laborious task now, doesn't actually fill very many hours in a given week. Filling my time is a part of my unemployment and an aspect of culture shock which I anticipated. But that doesn't mean I've yet figured out how to do it.

When I start to feel frustrated by the challenges of my new role as student, I just look at my French instructor, or my husband for that matter, and remind myself that their position is the alternative. I really am content with being on the student side of the desk. For now, anyway. And I am thankful for the distraction it provides for at least a few hours each week.

Tomorrow we head for the beach with some new acquaintances (potential friends?). Photos to follow next week!