Nikki Ahrens: Sometimes I’m Maria

I can’t help myself.  I love it when classroom discussions become “genuine discussions” and the flow of ideas is harmonious and fluid.  It’s nice when the professor can initiate the conversation, then several students reply and then turn to each other and have an intelligent discussion for a while.  As long as no one is stealing the floor or offending anybody then this is where a lot of juicy learning can take place.

Hand raising can spoil the rhythm of an otherwise free-flowing conversation.  Sometimes people forget what they wanted to say if they get stuck raising their hand for too long, waiting for a turn to speak.  I get bummed out when that happens to me, or worse yet, when the whole subject of the discussion changes before I even get a chance to express myself.  Sometimes I get so excited about what I want to say that I just blurt it out, only to find out that what was so neatly packed as a whole thought inside my head becomes a pile of fruitcake crumbs the minute it leaves my mouth. Nobody understands or cares about it. Not even me.

Why does this happen?  Why do I get like Maria when trying to offer up something for discussion in class, where my thoughts seem incomplete or scattered?  I think it has something to do with the anxiety I feel.  The anxiety comes from not wanting to take up too much class time with what I have to say, from worrying that my fellow students and/or professor might think that what I have to say is irrelevant, and from being concerned that I might not be able to convert my thoughts into the appropriate words within a reasonable amount of time.  Professors like June make it even worse.  My problem is that if I get stuck inside my own head for too long with no chance to participate, I become disenchanted and zone out entirely.  I try to keep up with the lecture but I can only take in so much information from a single direction.  Maybe sometimes my words get jumbled because I’m desperate to break up the monotony.

I can imagine being June.  I might get frustrated, especially if I had more than one Maria (or me) in my class.  Etiquette is such a powerful factor in how a person is judged.  People judge others based on etiquette without even knowing that they are doing it.  Maybe Maria is like me and thinks that college should be more interactive sometimes.  Maybe, like the article suggests, we are just rebelling against a system that doesn’t work very well for us.   Maybe we are better at writing than we are at talking.  Aren’t there a lot of people like that?