Confidence Man

So, part of the reason I post so infrequently here is that I am constantly flip-flopping about how I will use this blog. The big thing taking up my life right now is graduate school, and I am not sure what kind of friendships I will develop over the next couple of years. I have plenty of things to say about school, fellow students, instructors, etc, but I don't know if I would ever have a reason to make this thing more "public." As it is, I don't think any of my schoolmates, workmates, or instructors would ever connect this with "the real me." I've read a few very interesting stories about blogging issues in academia, and in the course of Googling blogs of graduate students I even came across a published retraction of one blogging students remarks, with a complete removal of the blog. Of course, that student was using a university-provided server and web space to publish a blog that was basically accusing his PhD program of being completely full of shit. You get what you ask for.

I'm in my fourth week of classes, and as much as I lke my schoolmates, it looks like will be keeping more or less to myself. So, this brings me to what I have wanted to write about here for a few weeks (since starting graduate school). I was so nervous on my first night of classes that I almost blew it off and skipped out on the whole thing. I was convinced that I was going to get to class and sound like a complete idiot the first time I opened my mouth. I was sure that I was going to be surrounded by brilliant intellectual prodigies who were going to be speaking an entirely different language. I and my night school, discount BS-with-highest-honors would be exposed for the fraud we were.

Boy, was I let down. The first class didn't reveal too much. The instructor, a professor I knew from working here at the university, gave us a run-down of what the class would involve, what he expected for the assignments, and asked the students to sign up to lead class discussions (the class is a seminar format discussion of interest groups). The students were all young, and asked the same kinds of questions I had gotten used to hearing in undergrad classes:"So, are the readings due on the week that they are listed on in the syllabus, or the week after?" "We're doing a take home final and a paper?" "Can we email our homework?" No Sweat.

The next week, we held the first class discussion, and by the middle of the class, I had the same feeling I had when I was in many of my undergraduate classes. I was frustrated that people were focusing on each other's opinions, instead of the thought processes that were used to arrive at the opinions. Everyone was trying to upstage each other with topical knowledge of the latest political scandals, and partisan sniping, but no one really knew whether the book we had read for class used rational choice theory or game theory or pluralist concepts of influence or neo-Marxism, etc. And finally, one young woman spoke up and said the word "like" five times in one sentence: "I was, like, surprised to, like, find out that that stuff, like, still goes on in, like, Congress after all the, like laws and stuff that were passed."

Talk about mixed emotions. On one side of my brain, I cringed at the butchering of the language and the complete lack of eloquence; on the other side, I was relieved to find I was in no danger of being laughed out of class, unless it was for being the teacher's pet.