return of the undergrad

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been trying to finish up my long-overdue chapter on Anna Ticknor's correspondence school. Even as I've made good progress, I've gotten hung up on certain parts, and for the life of me I can't figure out a conclusion -- long speculative remarks about the University of Phoenix and evangelical homeschooling or stick with the nineteenth century and just end it when Ticknor dies (a deadend?). I don't know. In any case, my adviser has been clamoring for a draft and has finally said that Friday is the deadline (neither of us are good at deadlines, but this one is hard and fast for a number of reasons). Instead of freaking out, becoming paralyzed, and doing nothing (i.e. roughly the last 2 years), I'm channeling my undergraduate self. The student who could sit down, write fifteen decent pages, sleep on it, edit it, and hand it in...early. That girl fled the country about five years ago, and I've been hunting her down ever since. It all just seemed so much easier back then and the stakes felt so much lower. Plus, I've felt for a long time that college is designed to make students feel smart. I'm probably as guilty as the next teacher on this score (though I've been fighting grade inflation one "C" at a time). Grad school, by my reckoning, is designed to make students feel not smart. Ultimately, this is probably an important lesson, but to write from that self-conception is damn near impossible. Those voices, though, are going on mute for the next 45 hours and this girl's making a mental return to the mountains of vermont....