I met Mr. Keating the other day. Well, my version of Mr. Keating. Not someone that reminds me of O captain my captain! or a parody with someone who is attempting to be him screaming
"carpe diem" with a handful of balloons, it's just...him.
Let me start in the beginning where the magic didn't happen yet and my expectation for this class was purely average and my intentions were very time-oriented. As a university, UIA has these little 0.5 credited co-curricular classes that we have to partake every semester in order to graduate, but living to the I and A in its acronym, UIA decided to have ALL students take specific co-cu classes in their first two years, which results to everyone fighting for their dates during prereg.
Of course this was a problem, especially to students who are doing engineering and architecture who are superbusy and need their own allocated days, so they get all wednesday classes, while all the other students have only saturday and sunday options (I attempt to ignore these blatant course biased decisions because it is not worth ranting about). The system wasn't on our side, so we had to break it somehow. I cannot have Saturday classes, the potential for me to skip half of them is lower than the probability of me skipping all of them.
So we turned our faces from Leadership management and Parenting, to Presentation Skills and Public Speaking. The majority of people taking this route are ICT students and Law students. The former is there for the schedule, the latter is there because they're good at it.
I took Wednesday night classes last semester, which was after webprog tutorials which was after the actual class which was conducted by Sir Sharyar Wani (again, the discussion about him shall be on a later date), and it was exhausting. 4 hours of Kashmiri teaching and another 2 hours presenting and/or listening to others' presentation. I almost never attended 8.30 calculus classes the next morning on time, or at all. So I figured the safest time to have night classes is when I don't have morning classes the day after, which reduces my option to only one section: section 4, thursday night.
I'll be honest, I really didn't want to go to the first class. It was a tiring day, and I just found out that my facilitator would be a debater. Co-cu classes don't get assigned facis until the second week of the semester and for every semester, the first class is always canceled so I was really reluctant to go thinking that if it was cancelled, the trip would be such a waste (for the record, Asiah to IRK is such a tiring route and I was already exhausted at that point of the day), but I went anyway, and the only adjective I want to use to describe the situation is
'magical'
First of all, my class was supposedly at IRK LR9, but it didn't exist, more or less like Kings Cross' platform 9 and three quarters. When I arrived, everyone was making a sort of oval shape in the corridor between LR 10 and LR8. Mr. Keating was talking about himself when he was attending UIA (I'll just refer to him as Mr. Keating because I want to) and it was a very relaxed chilling session. He said he's very lenient in giving grades. He mentioned that last semester there was someone who came only once and said Assalamualaikum and he gave him a C, I thought to myself,
'ooh I like this guy' one attendance one word and you get a C, that's quite a bargain. He said lots of nice things. He asked us to have our dinner first, or if that's not possible, bring the dinner to class and have it while the class is going on. Our first assignment was to watch Shawshank redemption, a tale of a man being wrongly accused of a crime he didn't commit and was sentenced to death. Our job is to talk about capital punishment during the next class. Only 15 minutes into googling about capital punishment, not more than 15 minutes. Our time should be more prioritized with family and friends and studies, not too much on a co-curricular class.
but it was when he asked if he could have the class start at 8.30 and end at 9.30 kind of made me flew off the ground.
"Let's make the class short and sweet." He went on and on about how it's important for a student to voice out their opinions but most lecturers
— the so-called
'easy lecturers' strip that ability off us. We are asked opinions but in their minds there already lays a set of answers that they want to see come flying out of our mouths.
He came into a halt and started asking about attendance and if there are any questions. It was a sign that the class is ending but I didn't want him to stop talking. I felt inspired, like he was talking about life and opportunities and growing and thinking and all I could hear was...
a hush whisper of carpe diem.
Labels: college, motivation, pop-culture reference