High school was pretty much a breeze for me. My classes challenged me, but I never had to put forth much more than just the minimum amount of effort to stay ahead, and I still ended up graduating with honors. This is not to say that I did poorly in undergrad – I didn’t, but I did struggle a lot more to keep up with the discourse. It was my sophomore year when it really hit me, sitting in my Study of Lit class (criticism/theory), that I had no idea what the hell was going on. As soon as I realized it in one class, I started realizing it in others too. I would do all the reading, but most of it was done on cruise control. I couldn’t remember what I’d read because it was so convoluted with terms I didn’t understand and concepts that were totally unfamiliar to me. I looked around at my friends. I looked at my classmates. I looked at my roommate –  the salutatorian of her high school class. They all seemed to have it under control. I started feeling like it was just me. I started getting so antsy when I read because all I could think about was that I didn’t understand what I was reading. Convinced that I was on the brink of failing out of college and living in my parents’ basement, I actually went and had myself tested for a learning disability.

As soon as I started reading Clueless in Academe, I was so relieved to see that this problem of mine is so much more common that I’d ever thought. I didn’t have a learning disability, and I obviously didn’t fail out of college (or live in my parents’ basement), but I did struggle through my studies. It’s frustrating to me now that there are books and things that I know I’ve read, discussions I know would be beneficial, but I just can’t remember them because I couldn’t connect on that level. I spent so many years thinking that this made me stupid or unintelligent. Reading Graff for me was in some ways like reading a self-help book for education. It made me feel better about myself, being one of the students that gets distracted by the  ten-cent words and unfamiliar discourse. His ideas seem so simple (like his writing), but yet, I feel like it would take a lot to get more professors to see it his way. I KNOW that I must have students who, like me, tune out and shut down as soon as the teacher starts speaking a language they don’t understand, so to speak.  I really think this plays a large part in why some students (again, like me) are less vocal in class. In that Study of Lit class, as well as quite a few others since, I’ve not wanted to open my mouth for fear that whatever I said was going to sound stupid coming after the brilliant comment before it. It’s really hard to be overwhelmed by information overload. And life after undergrad (and sometimes even IN undergrad) doesn’t always allow the time to stop and take every piece of reading apart and figure out its meaning.

This reading gave me ideas for how to avoid unclear messages in my classroom, and, to some extent, how to deal with it when I’m the student. In any case, it’s nice to know that there are enough people like me to warrant doing the research and writing the book :-)