Julia Louise-Dreyfus, the goddess of primetime television and creative essence behind the great Elaine Benes, never made it through college. No, she left Northwestern University after only three years. Similarly, Tom Hanks, possibly the most wonderful actor to ever grace the screen, left California State University before graduating.
Emily Bront and Thomas Edison, both obvious geniuses, never even made it to the higher levels of education. And both Vincent Van Gogh and Albert Einstein failed in their attempts to pursue the types of learning they originally craved.
So if these prodigies couldn't always deal with traditional styles of education, we shouldn't be expected to either. Should we?
I don't know about everyone else, but I am guessing most can relate to my new feeling of utter listlessness, complete disengagement, which arises from sitting through up to three or four class periods a day.
Certainly, I'm interested in the classes I'm taking -- that's why I'm taking them. The content, the reading, is great. Unfortunately, I just can't make myself do the reading or focus in class. At times, I would even say that I irrationally hate my classes.
But for those who share in my great dilemma, perhaps you -- like me -- can take comfort in the fact that the above-mentioned stars probably spent their fair share of class periods doodling on their notebooks and falling asleep in their chairs.
I still worry sometimes, though, as I often fall well below that level of moderate boredom. (And by watching everyone else, I know a lot of you do, too.)
In fact, in my first class of the day -- since I obviously can't pay attention -- I stoop to observing the weirdoes around me. My favorite, of course, is my immediate neighbor, who on some days falls asleep while writing only to jump in fear after looking at her watch. Still living with her watch set on Italy time as a form of escapist fantasy, she always seems to think she's slept through an entire day rather than just one class. It's always fun to help her back to reality.
On other days, my sleeper-friend comes to class pumped up on caffeine, and engages in a rather fascinating note-taking marathon. Writing madly, she pauses only to take a dramatic slurp from her water bottle. But although I have her odd routines down pretty well, I sadly have no idea what's going on in the class.
In my second lecture, I keep myself amused by talking to a friend. We sit there creating names for the pretentious classmates who can't help but respond elaborately to every question the professor poses. And then, if things are really boring, I often pull out my markers to color pictures of tropical islands and Victorian mansions.
Then I hit rock bottom. Having no entertaining peers to keep me occupied in class number three, I fall to a level of absolute disgust. Yes, I am disgusting in that class. The monotonous growl of learning clearly hits some note in my brain that forces me to concentrate wholly on picking at my fingernails. That's it. That's all I can do when I'm in there.
And sometimes I worry that that's all I will ever be able to do. Though I really do want to learn things, the thought of taking more classes and settling down to conventional career just makes me feel so tired.
And thus, I can only hope. I hope that one day I will join the ranks of Julia, Tom, Albert and the rest of them. I, like so many of the other cool, brilliant people in the world, can have that little paragraph in my biography about not being able to finish school. But no one will care, because I will be brilliant, right?
So all of us who suffer from school-induced fatigue no longer have to worry. We can just sit back and wait for our brilliance to emerge, for those publishable novels to appear on our computer screens, for those great inventions to pop out of light bulbs over our heads, and for those movie scripts to pile up outside of our doors.
I, for one, might be doomed to a life of blending in, of developing into something much less than brilliant, as some annoying guy in the dining hall last week hinted, telling me that I "look like everybody else."
So let me know if brilliance and fame start popping up somewhere -- maybe in a certain class or in one of those free-stuff things in Thayer -- I think I could use the extra help.
