As the uninspired name suggested, English Composition II was the follow-up to English Composition I. Both geared toward freshmen, I often wondered if upperclassmen ever enrolled? Or was the idea that the English department required passing grades in English Composition I and II before any other English courses could be attempted? Maybe...I wasn’t an English major so I don’t know.
English Composition II was very much the class I thought English Composition I should have been. Part II seemed more structured and organized. Part I seemed hastily tossed together. Part II seemed to actually dwell on composing essays. Part I seemed more interested in discussing how you’d piece together an essay, given the chance. Part I also focused more on basic capitalization and punctuation skills that I felt was overkill. For part II, a thick textbook of short stories and poetry was promptly dumped in our laps in our first class (well, not really – we had to pay through the nose for the book first) and we quickly dove into travelers from antique lands, decreeing stately pleasure-domes, and observing lumps of lapis lazuli for tomb effigies of soon-to-deceased clergy.
At the helm of the class was Ms. Eva Fontaine, a demure caricature of the token spinster librarian figure. She’d probably been teaching for decades and hadn’t yet found any displeasure in the honorable act – though she surely wasn’t too excited about the actions of the modern student. Still, for all her wrinkles and stutters, Ms. Fontaine was sharp as a tack and exuded a fierce determination to teach and instill some redeeming qualities in her classes.
And that was the odd thing about our class: there probably weren’t more than 25 of us, meeting in a fairly large auditorium Tuesday and Thursday morning at eight o’clock sharp. Getting up and out the door by seven thirty or so wasn’t difficult by my second semester. I forget what I did for breakfast these days but I could easily amble my way from the dorm to the quad in mere minutes and find where I was going with little interruption. But where I ended up...geesh! This half of the Eckert Complex was the old band building and perhaps where this class met was once a performance hall. Many of the rooms in this part of the building had been practice rooms for band members – now they were over-sized offices that held two or more instructors.
The auditorium was obviously empty every time I arrived since I was constantly early; on my first day, I took an aisle seat three or four rows from the front (on stage left of Ms. Fontaine). Since the class was so small she asked that I take a seat in one of the first four or five rows in the middle section, instead. I remember grumbling, thinking how everyone always says your interest in a class is shown by your distance from the instructor (those down front find the topic engrossing, those in the back care not but for passing). Here I was showing an interest and being asked to move. So I took a seat as far back would allow: aisle seat, five rows back. By myself.
Since I arrived early I was usually by myself in the room for a few minutes before anyone else materialized and so I took to examining my surroundings. It was a well-lit room, for one, as the room jutted out on the west side of the building and had floor-to-ceiling windows on two walls. The third wall was partially masked by a shortened wall that served as a backdrop for the instructor or speaker. This dividing wall was about two-third the length of the western wall of the room; one could easily walk around either end and stumble into various equipment such as a television/VCR combo, an overhead projector, and stacks of extra chairs. There was nowhere else to store this in the room so it was stashed here, out of sight. Sort of. Opposite the equipment was the western wall of the room and two sets of doors that led outside and into the long-disused remnants of Avenue E. Why expensive equipment was stored mere inches from a door that could easily lead to a getaway truck, I never knew. I assumed if it wasn’t anyone else’s concern then it shouldn’t be mine, either.
By the time someone else showed up for class I had been watching the world through the windows or doors for a few minutes. It gave me time to think and prepare for the day. It also went on to give me an idea for one of the funniest things I did in college.
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Composition II
(Guberman)
Morgan Guberman
From the album Hamadryas Baboon
1998
