It’s funny to see the way Professor Francis teaches this stuff compared to how MLK talks about it. He’s slow and steady with dramatic pauses. She moves around and waves her hands and talks fast.
This is our second day on the Civil Rights era. Professor Francis, who is half-Black and half-Chinese, is telling us why the court cases from that time period are so important. “Do y’all see me? It’s possible for me to be your professor because of the legal precedent laid down in cases like Brown v. Board of Education.”
Two hours fly by with a professor like that. Now I have a 20-minute walk to the Fishery Sciences Building, down by Portage Bay, for Biology of Shellfishes with Professor Chelsea Wood. It’s a pretty tough class because we have to memorize a bunch of Latin words, but we also get to watch videos of animals hunting. Did you know a starfish is a predator? They have tubes on their feet and a mouth on the bottom of their body, and they crawl around and suck up their prey.
Professor Wood starts today’s lecture with a story from her grad school days. She sailed for a week straight to get to a remote island with a research group. One day they were wading through shallow water, and she warned her students that the area was full of tiger sharks. All of a sudden, something latched onto her foot. “The horrified students stood behind me, probably wondering, ‘How do we get back to the boat? Should we bring her body with us?’”
Professor Wood clicks her laptop to reveal a picture of a stretched-out tentacle, which kind of looks like an octopus. “This is what attacked me. I was attacked… by a sea cucumber!” The kid next to me gasps. “They can liquify themselves on command,” Professor Wood says, “because they have mutable connective tissues. Those tissues liquify when a threat approaches and then re-solidify when it’s safe. Now you will never forget what mutable connective tissue is.”
Alright, two classes down. Now I have to catch a bus to Bothell. It’s 12:20, and I have a 1:15 class on the UWB campus. Each quarter I can take one class at a different UW campus, so I signed up for Politics of the Middle East with Professor Karam Dana. One of my friends told me that this class changed his life. But he also said Coachella changed his life. I mostly signed up for the class because Professor Dana has great reviews on RateMyProfessors.com.
The bus took forever today. I’m ten minutes late, and this isn’t a big class, so Professor Dana will definitely notice. I’m going through the back door anyway. “You’re late,” he says as soon as I walk in. “The rule is, if you come in late, you give me a compliment.” I tell him I like his shirt. He nods. “In about 10 days, Ramadan will start. I probably won’t be as friendly as I am now. It gets harder the older I get.”
Professor Dana has a booming presence. He knows everybody’s name and he calls on you even if you don’t raise your hand. Today we’re talking about migration. Professor Dana asks each of us to think about what it’s like for us when we cross a border—what advantages and disadvantages come with our identities? “Hell, I’m Palestinian,” he says. “I have a very complicated relationship with borders.”
We’re talking about Israel and Palestine for the next two weeks of class, and pretty much everyone in here has an opinion about it. “I want you guys to stretch your thinking, to recognize your own biases, to go beyond the typical media coverage,” Professor Dana says. “How can we think creatively about peaceful and democratic coexistence?”
I’m grabbing coffee before I take the 372 back to Seattle. I have six minutes before the next bus and there are five people ahead of me in line. The woman behind me looks like she’s in a hurry, too. I tell her we must have come at the wrong time. She says she’s using the downtime to change her Twitter username, because she applied for a research grant on Twitter, and the grant makes you put your full name on your profile.
It turns out she’s an education professor who teaches a storytelling workshop, and her students use iPads to tell multimedia stories about their lives.
I tell her I mostly use Instagram, and that it usually feels like I’m mindlessly scrolling. She says I should take control of my digital identity. “Digital identity… like my brand?” I ask. She says to think about it less as marketing, and more as being civic-minded. “You’re not selling yourself. You’re not the product,” she says. “It’s about how you can contribute, what you have to offer, and who you want to connect with.” I tell her I’d love to take her workshop. “In the meantime, you can find me on Twitter,” she says as the barista hands me my coffee. “It’s @jvg, for Jane Van Galen.”
I had to run to catch the bus. The driver looked annoyed. I need to call my mom when I get home, then I’m heading to the Ave. Some friends are meeting for dinner, and then I’m doing homework at TeaRepublik. I have so much reading due tomorrow. I’m starting to wonder if I took too many classes this quarter.