Reading: Ordinary Jack

Moving: 30' Star Trac elliptical, with two 2-lb. handweights, average heart rate 168, mostly <24' mile--I don't know how that's calculated, I don't breathe that hard running a 15' mile--and >100 strides per minute. Plus all my weights.

14 March 2000: Twenty Percent

I pad barefoot up to the podium, adjust the microphone, and gaze at the sea of faces, trying to give the impression of making eye contact while actually not making any such thing. "Hi."

"Hi!" rebounds the response, the audience nearly but not quite in sync.

"My name's Lisa."

"Hi, Lisa!" Encouragement blended with antici-pation.

"My name's Lisa," I repeated, "and I'm wasting my life."

A startled silence glazes every eye. Had I walked into the wrong room? Is this Narcotics Anonymous? I lean out to check the penciled sign on the door. Perhaps the startlement is due only to my admission being so immediate?

A deep breath, and I start again. "I didn't intend to be a staff assistant at [nearly] 32. I wanted to do something worthwhile, to make a difference, to make my mark. I haven't yet. So today I came here to UCD, to this orientation about Initial Teacher Education, to learn how I could get a master's in curriculum and instruction and become a high school English teacher. I heard this professor at the UC-Denver Open House a couple of weeks ago, and I liked her and her enthusiasm, and I came today, and she's just as enthusiastic.

"I knew I would have to take U.S. Lit to fulfill content prerequisites. I mean, of course it's ridiculous that an accredited U.S. university would graduate with an English major anyone who hadn't taken at least three credits in American lit." There are nods. "But English was a last-minute major--my other, main one, History, did require at least three credits in a survey of U.S. history." Sighs of relief. "As I look at these Teaching Field Requirements, though...," thumbing for the page, "I realize my English major might as well have been in Anthropology.

"I have fulfilled a paltry 20% of the content prereqs for this program."

Now the murmur of disapproval mounts into hisses of disgust. I flee from the room.

That's not how it happened, but that's how it felt. I was not barefoot, I did not speak publicly, and everyone was grinning at everyone else, particularly the professor leading the orientation, encouraging our ambitions. But when I saw that list I was crushed. I've spent my life reading to the exclusion of learning to knit, pitch a baseball, cook a meal, to the extreme of being unable to converse with anyone who doesn't read, and I am unfit to teach literature.

The University of Colorado at Denver's content requirements:

• American Literature (survey course that addresses the literary heritage of our country)
• Contemporary World Literature (includes minority and women writers)
• British Literature
• Expository or Creative Writing (advanced course)
• Language Development. Options include: LLC 5070 Linguistic Analysis of English (education course) or English 4080 or 4171.

UConn didn't require a survey in U.S. lit. For students admitted for the fall of 1986, the requirements for a major in English were the following three-credit uppper division courses:

• Poetry
• Shakespeare
• Chaucer, more Shakespeare, or Milton
• Two English period classes (medieval, Renaissance, Restoration & 18th Century, Romantic & Victorian, and Modern)
• Three other three-credit upper division English classes
• Two other three-credit non-English upper division classes that complement the major (like oh just for instance English History to 1603 or Masterworks of 19th Century Russian Lit (in translation))
• One year of a foreign language (Russian and I hated each other, but I didn't fail it.)

Before I decided to do a double major, I had taken, because I liked them,

• Modern English Lit (fifth semester)
• Modern Irish Lit (seventh semester--this decided me)

In my eighth semester, I took

• Poetry
• Shakespeare

and in my ninth,

• Studies in Lit & Culture: Evil in Lit
• Restoration and 18th Century Lit
• Romantic & Victorian Lit
• Chaucer

plus two one-credit romps for my amusement:

• Special Topics: Comedy
• Writing Practicum: Grammar for Writers

Aside from the two romps, that exactly fulfills the English requirements, no extras, no electives, nothing to spare.

I didn't take Usan Lit because it wasn't a requirement and I had rathered take a class with my beloved Shakespeare professor on Evil in Lit instead. Off the top of my head and not looking at my electronic booklist or physical bookshelves, I've read Moby-Dick and "Bartleby the Scrivener" and Leaves of Grass and Walden and The Fall of the House of Usher and The House of Seven Gables (these two I readily confuse, Poe and Hawthorne being so much alike), and Frederick Douglass and Huckleberry Finn and McTeague and Emily Dickinson and Stephen Crane and the Worst Novel in the History of the World, Uncle Tom's Cabin Or Life among the Lowly. And the second worst, Sister Carrie. And Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Willa Cather and Edith Wharton, and Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker, and Richard Wright but not Ralph Ellison or DuBois. Nothing from earlier than 1800 and that's just how I want to keep it, except maybe the Federalist Papers and Common Sense. Plus I've swum in Walden Pond. Twice.

I've not taken a class in Contemporary World Literature. Off the top of my head and not looking at my electronic booklist or physical bookshelves, I've read The Three-Inch Golden Lotus and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Marquez, and J.M. Coetzee and Michael Ondaatje who probably don't count even though they're not Usan because they're male Afrikaans, and Kazuo Ishiguro who might not count because he's British even if he is Japanese, and Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, and no Salman Rushdie and I haven't finished The God of Small Things yet--because I had all these kids' books to read, see.

I have never even heard of an advanced class in Expository Writing. That's a freshling course. Advanced would be Journalism. The Climbing Tree knows I'd benefit from further instruction in structure and development, of course. Advanced Creative I've heard of, sure, but at UC you had to produce material (not journaling, worse luck) and the professor had to select you.

And Language Development is strictly a school of ed sort of thing. Perhaps I should not be ashamed of not having taken that 20%.