Back in the saddle again. What saddle? The dreaded college classroom.

May of 2011. That was my last experience as a student in an actual classroom, with the lecturing and the discussing and the paper tests. Since that time, my experience in a classroom has been that of a teacher. For the past three, going on four, years I have lectured students, led discussions, and given the paper tests. I have had complete (ish) control of the material, methods, activities, and assessments. I have told students where to sit and what to write. I’ve reprimanded, praised, conversed, and counseled. I have survived classroom after classroom full of students from the hyperactive to the lethargic. And I have been the focal point, the leader.

I’m in a master’s program, and up to this point, it has all been online. Now, I know several of you cringe at the thought of online classes, but let me say this: I love them. I love the fact that I can work when I want, read on my own, and interact with others as little as humanly possible (I am an extrovert, but I am a very busy, very tired extrovert). If there is confusion, type a forum! If there is a difficult assignment, email people! It just makes grad school on top of a family and full-time job so much simpler.

That being said, not all classes can translate well onto the interwebs, so the poor, struggling, working grad students are forced to grudgingly rejoin the campus life.

And just let me tell you how weird that was.

Driving onto the campus of my alma mater for the first time in years, I was immediately bombarded by memories of my first college experience. That lost feeling, the pit of anxiety, the sweaty palms of the simple college freshman all came rushing in. Shortly after that, I told myself I was being ridiculous, parked in a visitor parking spot (because why would I have a decal – my classes are all online), and began the hike to a building I used to know across a campus I somehow still remember.

As I walked, the memories kept coming. The faces I haven’t seen for years suddenly appeared in my mind…I saw us sitting under trees and on benches between classes, wandering back to the dorms after dinner, skipping class to play at the parks, and let’s not forget the shenanigans like mattress surfing down the halls, or the “someone” who kept putting soap in the fountain. There was an odd sense of coming home along that walk, from the students walking by with to-go boxes from the cafeteria or the boys running through the sprinklers in 40-degree weather on a dare. I was thrown into a world I thought I had lost or left behind. And while I did leave it behind for awhile, I found that I remember so much that I thought I forgot. I just needed the reminder.

So I made it to my class, and, again, just let me tell you how weird that was. To be clear, my teacher seems just lovely, and any seemingly negative comments are definitely not directed at her. But the simple fact that I’m taking an actual lecture class?

[Insert groans of frustration here]

I don’t have the attention span to take a lecture class anymore. Years of keeping up with high-schoolers, middle-schoolers, and two toddlers have made my hyperactive and easily distracted brain worse. But this required on-campus class may be one of the best things to happen to me along this path of higher education. This class reminds me of how difficult it used to be to sit still for hours and hours on end. It reminds me of the struggles with attention span and drowsiness that I used to face as a high school and college student and gives me patience when I see that in my students. And it makes me look at teaching with a whole new perspective. I have an all-too-fresh understanding of what my students battle day in and day out – the lecture. This feeling was one of the things that I forgot, and that I desperately needed a reminder of.

I’ve written before about both the struggles and the rewards of teaching. This follows along those lines. I believe that teachers should be reminded what it’s like to sit in class. I believe that we should have to listen to other teachers and experience the lectures and discussions and activities we plan, frustrating as it may be to sit there. I believe that these experiences will serve to humble us and remind us of things we’ve forgotten, and I believe we will become better teachers because of it.