I Was a Willing Participant :: Personal Narrative Writing

I Was a Willing Participant Toward the end of last semester, I registered for this class mainly for one reason: I had had Emily as a professor before, I liked her class and her teaching style very much, and I wanted to again take a class she was teaching. This was my first opportunity to do so, and I jumped on it. In the bulletin, the class was described as the Graduate Writing Seminar, and through the grapevine, I found out it was not a creative writing class, but instead, a study in critical feminist pedagogies.What the hell, I thought. Ià ­ll take it anyway. After all, I really just wanted to take another class with Emily, whatever the topic might be. Over winter break, I started thinking about who else would be in the class. I am sure some of the usual suspects would be in Dixon 432 on that first day. Sure enough, when I walked, in I saw Alicia, Megan, Kate, and Kelly, just as I had expected. Before that first day, however, the number one thought going through my mind about this class and the makeup of my classmates was, of course, just how many males would be in that room. For a while, I thought I may be the only one, but I shook that thought out of my mind pretty quickly when I reminded myself that, after all, this was grad school, and the guys here were actually open minded and weren't afraid to take a class containing the prefix fem. I was right. In walked to see Gary and Leon. I had had classes with both of them before, and I knew their ways of thinking, so I felt à ¬safe.à ® (Though I must admit that when Gary first proclaimed himself a à ¬feministà ® in Sharon Lewis' class last semester, my initial thought was à ¬this guy just wants to get laid.à ® That was stupid and wrong.) So here I was, one-third of a population of a class that was certainly not going to be the topic of discussion for the next 5 or so months. I was ready to accept that. The program here at MSU had given me many chances to expand my thinking in ways that I had not previously been exposed to, and this class was yet another in that long line.