Spring 2020: The Weirdest Semester Of My Life

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The fall semester of this academic year felt like one cohesive story. I started my first semester at Wheaton, met friends, navigated classes, developed a routine, and ended by going home for winter break. The semester had a beginning, middle, and end. This semester did not. There was certainly a beginning, but I quickly learned that spring break, which I thought was going to mark the middle of the semester, actually marked the end. Two weeks later, I began the semester online, with the same people and classes, but this time a completely different setting, curriculum, stress level, way of communicating, and world. The end of this semester doesn’t seem near. For one, I still have a number of exams and papers to get through until I am formally done. But I also have no way to mark the end of the semester- I can’t say goodbye to friends or move out of my dorm- so it doesn’t feel like the semester will really end. After this semester officially ends, everything will remain the same. I will still face time friends and take time to read. I will still prioritize learning and spending time with people I care about. This entire summer, or at least until it is safe to leave home again, will feel like a never-ending Spring Semester.

This semester has felt like one of those Madlibs games you play as a little kid, where you come up with a bunch of random nouns, verbs, and adjectives and throw them in a story. We had a normal beginning, but ended up experiencing political tension, impeachment trails, international conflict, natural disasters, a pandemic, and killer bees, all within 5 months. It feels more like an endless spiral of unrelated events than it does a well written story with a clear plot and an end. But if I have learned anything from reading books, this all will have to end at some point. Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History Of The Senses was a terribly written book, in terms of plot. There was no cohesive thread throughout the book, it was just a compilation of anecdotes, all seemingly unrelated. Ackerman’s book was a series of unrelated events that made the book confusing to read and impossible to decipher the point of. Despite how bad it was, after I finished reading the book, I understood why she wrote it. I walked away with a deeper understanding of the senses, and why they are so vital to our lives. I may never understand why she wrote in such an odd style, or why not all of her “facts” are true, or why she thought a story about cows dying in quicksand was a good way to begin discussing the beauty of whale songs. I will probably never regard Ackerman’s book as a full, complete, halfway decent story, but at least I got something out of making my way through it. Hopefully, I will be able to say the same about this semester.

Comments

  1. Jonathan Brumberg-KrausMay 13, 2020 at 12:03 PM

    What goes on in that mind of yours? You're quiet in class, so it's not always easy to know what you're thinking. But when you write - such an interesting, provocative, and eloquent take on things!

    ReplyDelete

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