For my undergraduate education, I spent four years here. Adventures aside (hour of pour with Poje, or stealing her arm), it was a rather humble, quiet, and unassuming existence...
At least, that's how I nostalgically remembered it today, my first day as a graduate teaching assistant at a large state university - a state university with over 30,000 undergraduates (roughly the size of the town I was born in twenty-six years ago). Since this number is approximately fourteen or fifteen times the number of students at my old undergraduate institution, I think my fellow Augustana alumni can forgive me for (again, hour of power aside) looking on my bygone college years with some sugar-coated, idealistic nostalgia... particularly since these thoughts, including memories of the largest class I ever took in college (some 70 students total), raced through my head as I stood - dumbstruck, weak, and helpless - in a Goliath lecture hall next to three professors and five other graduate teaching assistants, staring at the towering mass of our charges for the quarter... over 300 of them.
And to think I once considered complaining about that class of 70.
Posted by James at January 3, 2007 10:11 PM