As per usual I was hyper aware, my nerves fully charged as I selected a seat toward the back in my Comp 1 class.
People filed in and then the professor came in. A very tall, rail thin, lanky woman with cropped brown hair, many ear piercings, a short skirt, sleeveless shirt and glasses. She happened to look exactly like my eleventh and twelfth grade English teacher.
Which wasn’t a possibility as my English teacher at my Bais Yaakov type school was orthodox and had a short blonde wig. She did not have numerous piercings and wore orthodox-modest long skirts. I had found her doppelganger. This was unfortunate. My English teacher had accused me of plagiarizing a line from a paper on A Separate Peace. I found this insulting, not because of the implications on my moral character, but because of the implication that I needed to cheat.
The resemblance was eerie. And then in struck me. The professor’s name was my high school teacher’s maiden name. I nugget of information I had forgotten. They were sisters. Duh.
After class I pushed aside my anxiety of college and of talking to people and approached my professor to ask, “Do you know a Mrs. R?”
She gave me a look and replied, “I am Mrs. R.”
So, being a realist, I took this to mean I would not leave college still orthodox. Like her if I would drift astray from Torah path under the influence of college. The rabbis and teachers at my high school had given dire warnings of such things.
My anxiety reached overdrive. Should I stay in college? Should I not?
I took three classes that semester. I earned an A, A+ and a B.
That ‘B’ would be the only grade under an A- that I would earn at college.
I know my work was not up to par but I always wondered if there was some sort of pyschological reason I could not conquer that class.
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