At the beginning of July, I went back briefly to Boise State University and took Orff Level I to be certified in the popular music education methodology inspired by composer Carl Orff. I say I "went back" to BSU because, even though the course was only two weeks long, I still had to apply to the graduate college, buy a parking permit, and - my personal favorite (note the sarcastic tone) - pay fees and tuition. I felt quite collegiate again, spending two weeks on campus complete with the SUB (Student Union Building), University library, and school of such and such buildings.
It has been three years since I received my Master's Degree and ten since I received my Bachelor's. Needless to say, I reverted, once again, to my obsessive, anal college ways.
"What do you mean 'revert?'" Dan said. "It's not like you're any less anal now that you're out of college."
Despite my husband's opinion, I did regress into my former, type-A personality, academia-centered, college student self. Some might go so far as to just call me a nerd.
I was scared of getting into trouble with my professors. I wanted stickers (A+s) on all of my assignments. I had fairly extensive homework every night. I couldn't get my handwritten musical notation to look quite right (no, we weren't allowed to use Finale or Sibelius), and I spent a lot of time erasing and rewriting, reminiscent of my undergrad self hunched over staff paper, composing the perfect 12-tone serialist piece for Music Theory IV.
During a philosophical discussion in class, my collegiate self made a comment about music being a core academic discipline by Plato's standards.
One of the professors taking the course later asked me, "Do you have your Master's Degree?"
I told him I did. Actually, my collegiate self probably phrased it like, "Why yes, indeed I do."
"I thought so," he said, adding that he figured I had taken an educational philosophy/theory/whatever class.
"I think I just picked that knowledge up somewhere along the way in my professional reading," I said in my most scholarly tone.
What college course is complete without that annoying student who questions, contradicts, tries to "catch" and correct the teacher, and tells everyone else what to do? No, it wasn't me, even though I have made my collegiate self sound rather snooty. But there was one student in the class who fit that description (this is the time when I warn everyone to be nice around me because you could end up in my blog).
I thought I was the only one who had noticed this super obnoxious behavior until a fellow student, who seemed habitually calm and collected by nature, whispered during an activity, "She drives me crazy."
At the end of the course, we received our certificates at a mini graduation ceremony. We were music teachers after all, so our graduation consisted of recorder, dance, and Orff instrument performances. Our families were invited, and a classmate and I joked about our two supportive, engineer husbands sitting in the middle of the room, arms crossed, watching the proceedings stoically and silently.
One of the instructors invited our family members to join a folk dance. Dan made eye contact with me and shook his head subtly. He eventually joined the circle when realized he would have been the only one sitting out. It's all about blending in with him.
I was assigned to one of the more technically difficult xylophone parts in the Orff piece, and I was quite nervous about this, being a vocalist by trade and not a percussionist. I was so distracted by my xylophone-playing anxiety that I only played about 10% of the time in the recorder ensemble. But I nailed the xylophone part in the end.
As Dan and I left campus that afternoon, my collegiate self made one last comment before vanishing to boring Academia-La-La-Land for another few years.
"I'm going to frame this and put it on the wall," Collegiate Self said, admiring the certificate, "and then I'll have more diplomas than you."
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