College Kidz

The first week I got here, Kim invited me to sit into a college lecture that goes on about half a mile from the lab. When I first heard about this, I had no idea what the lecture was about, I just wanted to go see what it would look like to be in a class full of hundreds of students.

I walked into Peretson Hall and found not too many students sitting in the hundreds of seats. I figured since it was about six minutes before class started, they would get here in five. I walked down the aisle with Kim and spoke to her until I found a comfortable spot on the left side of the hall. I sat near the middle of the row, leaving room for other kids to sit beside me. When someone came and sat two seats to the left of me, I got extremely nervous, but was relieved that they weren’t in the seat next to me. At about 9:01 a flock of students crowded the aisles and tried to race for the seat closest to the top of the class so that they wouldn’t get entirely noticed and could leave at the end of class. At this same time, two students were looking for seats, and guess who had two empty seats next to her, me! They sat next to me and I took out my notebook as they did and began to take notes as Kim was talking. By the time the second slide had finished I had not even gotten down all of the information from the first slide that I wanted to. I realized that this was a very fast paced course and I would have to condense my notes well enough to keep up with what Kim talked about. From that point on, I kept up with all of the slides and was doing a better job about comprehending the information, I even answered two of the clicker questions correctly, which assured me that I was accurately obtaining the information.

While I was doing an okay job at writing and listening, the person next to me was having a difficult time getting all of the information down on their notebook. I noticed that each time Kim changed the slide to move onto a new topic, he went from slouching in his chair, deep into his writing to sitting up straight and moving his head left and right. It was extremely hilarious to me to see this college student looking down at my notes to copy from. Me! A highschool student! He clearly didn’t know that I was a high school student, but I thought this pattern of him trying to be smooth about looking at notes was funny and I didn’t stop it. I would have shared them with him, but I was too nervous to say anything because I didn’t know if what was written down was reflected on the slides.