Making a classroom attitude change

Ihave a really hard time talking in class. For a while, it always seemed to me that it was everyone's fault but my own, mostly my peers'. There is no great love lost between myself and the Penn student body. We broke up after freshman year when I got a bike and no longer had to brave Locust Walk and its barrage of useless flyers and phony social interactions.

I guess by most people's standards, that makes me a loser. But I have to say I feel reasonably cool when I sit in class, silent, and observe the people around me. Over the years, I have come to identify about two dozen or more types of class-talkers. My personal favorites are as follows.

Super Un-Confident: These contributors are incapable of providing any commentary that doesn't begin with, "I don't know, but," or "This could be wrong, but," or "I was just going to say that." Of course you were just going to say that. You just said it.

The Over-Confident Blonde: She's blonde! She's blonde! That's all she's got going for her! That and she's almost certainly in a sorority, the only two criteria at Penn for thinking you're God's gift to everyone around you. She's awfully fond of commenting in the middle of broad, abstract conversations on something specific in her personal life, like how existentialism is a lot like the time her sister broke her foot. No one cares.

Raging Gingivitis: I know it's 9 in the morning, but these classrooms are poorly ventilated and cramped. It's difficult to concentrate on discussion points when I've got pages four through eight of the day's Daily Pennsylvanian crammed up my nose. Plus, it should be noted that Au Bon Pain coffee is not a breath mint.

And my personal favorite, The Great White Noise: She's an unstoppable Force of Nomenclature. She's got a half-hour's worth of material to cover and she'll be damned if 25 other students get in the way. The name of this game is domination. Once she's acknowledged, the whole world melts away, and it's just her and her professor. Has he gotten up to use the bathroom? Follow him. Blather on at the top of your lungs next to the urinal. Hopefully, God willing, he'll notice you.

Then there's me, the Say-Nothing, Judge-Everything, Condescending Bitch in the back of the classroom making snide comments to whoever is sitting next to me.

I have had several professors ask me, sometimes repeatedly, to participate in classroom discussions. I write good papers and exams, my attendance is high, yet every day I sit, arms crossed, content to doodle, to look at the clock, to think about other things, predominantly sex. I leave class as inconspicuously as possible.

Then I began working in the English Department office. Suddenly, I was surrounded by my professors outside of class. I couldn't escape them. As I tossed their magazine subscription renewal forms into their mailboxes, my professors passed on their way to office hours, acknowledging me uninterestedly. Being inconspicuous doesn't feel quite as cool without a desk to slouch behind.

The worst is any interaction with the professors I had earlier in my Penn career. If I smile in recognition, they ask blankly if I've finished the xeroxing. They can't remember my face or my name. I didn't excel -- I was just paperwork.

But there was one class in which I never had to open my mouth, but still participated -- professor Al Filreis' English 88, an online poetry course I took from my hometown in Minnesota. Students attended class via satellite and commented in a chat room monitored by a teaching assistant. Without the pressure of other students, or of waving my hand maniacally in the air, or of hearing the awkward squawk that my voice becomes, I felt at liberty to say whatever mindless crap I thought up. And somehow, some of that crap ended up being pertinent crap.

Perhaps this type of technology will be utilized in every classroom, to give strength to the shy and an attitude adjustment to the surly.

But it'll be too late for me, and it's no one's fault but my own. I get jealous when I sift through the files of incoming students, jealous as if those Penn InTouch photos are all ex-boyfriends' new girlfriends. Soon they'll be replacing me. I gave up on my peers, but even though they couldn't be my friends, they had moments in class that sometimes approached genius. Most of all, I shouldn't have let all my eye-rolling and laugh-stifling get in the way of meaningful relationships with the brilliant Penn faculty.

Jessica Lussenhop is a senior English major from St. Paul, Minn. Textual Revolution appears on Fridays.

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