Who Am I Bringing to This Class?

Dear Dr. Brannon/The Class/Whoever Randomly Stumbled Upon This Page Via Google,


Who am I bringing to this class?

A WIP, as writers say.  A living, breathing Work In Progress.  I am still figuring out who I am and who I want to become in life

I live on the same street outside of the same small town in Lincoln County where I was raised.  I'm lucky enough to have always the opportunity to enjoy lots of wide, open spaces and the beauty of being near horses and other animals.  I can walk down the street to visit my aunts and grandparents and cousins and I always have an equine shoulder to hug or cry on.  Cities and urban spaces are unfamiliar territory to me, but I am learning to try to branch out some these days.

Growing up, I was also "that quiet girl" who read a lot and kind of faded into the background.  I wrote the answers to the teachers' questions in my notebook rather than raising my hand and took online classes in the library for most of my senior year, but I was somehow still universally considered to be one of the smartest students in our year.  (Probably because I read a lot-- it doesn't matter if you read Harlequin novels or Oscar Wilde, most people assume any girl who reads in public is automatically Hermione Granger.) 

Despite how well I did in school, I always looked forward to 3:15 PM so that I could go home and continue my "real life", reading the books I wanted to read and running around outside until the fireflies came out.

Like Dr. Brannon, I grew up relatively privileged in a small Southern town where many people are far from privileged.  My great-grandfather was a Congressman and I grew up visiting the library where his watercolor portrait hangs on the reading room wall.  Some of my family drive Mercedes, have "summer cabins" bigger than my house, and go to expensive European schools, but I myself have not lived "the luxe life" by any means.  Still, in my senior year of high school, my relatives encouraged me to apply to UNC Chapel Hill, the official alma mater of our family.  I had the grades, the SAT scores, and, I thought, the ambition to leave my small town and start a charmed life at a "Public Ivy League" school.  I moved into my new dorm in Chapel Hill that next August, expecting to drink from the Old Well and graduate in four years, to one day attend alumni events at the Carolina Inn with my aunts and uncle.

But-- spoiler alert-- that isn't what happened.  I transferred to UNC Charlotte at the end of last year after a long bout of homesickness and a series of roommate altercations.  It is a very different experience, commuting to school and working (thirty hours or more a week) versus living in a campus dorm and walking everywhere.  In hindsight, I wish I had not transferred, but at the same time I don't deeply regret moving back to the area where I grew up, and where my heart still is, either.  I am sometimes ambivalent (or wishy-washy, if you like) about why I chose to transfer and exactly what I want to do next.  I often think that, at seventeen, I probably wasn't ready to leave home so suddenly and find myself thrust into an entirely different culture and the college lifestyle.  But I know that next time I leave home, I will probably be ready.

I have dreamed of becoming an English teacher since middle school, though I don't yet know where or in which grades I'll end up teaching.  Last semester I sort of "apprenticed" myself to the middle school AIG Language Arts teacher who made me want to become a teacher in the first place, and she has almost convinced me to try teaching at the middle school level. 

I like teenagers and pre-teens for the same reasons that many people dislike them: they're self-conscious and single-minded and weird and occasionally have no "filter".  Sounds like a self-portrait.  Which is why I think my future students and I will probably get along, if I can only manage to convince them that Jane Austen and Wilkie Collins are as cool as Eminem.  

I also have always wanted to be a writer, though-- a novelist.  I want to write novels like the ones I devoured and blogged about in middle and high school and, with a lot of practice and determination, I hope to one day make my dream of becoming a published author a reality. 

As of right now, though, I work in a grocery store.  The people I work with and our eccentric regulars provide me with great fodder for future characters.  In all seriousness, they could easily populate a Dickensian novel about a backwoods North Carolina town.  Their sense of humor and (readily recited) life stories have helped to "ground" me and made me somewhat less flighty and more aware of people's every-day struggles.  I do sort of love/hate my job, in another example of that characteristic wishy-washiness. 

However, I am loving studying at UNC Charlotte.  I'm an English/History double major (you guessed it, because I couldn't pick one over the other), and have a long-running infatuation with Victoriana.  The historical Victorian Era, melodramatic Victorian literature, neo-Victorian novels, Victorian architecture-- I love it all.

We English majors are definitely the greatest people in the world, even if we are generally afraid of math and spend a lot of time discussing what I think of as our prospective, collective poverty.  I'm really excited to be in this class this summer, studying English from the interesting and (to me) novel perspective of identity and rhetoric. 

Sincerely,

Hannah K. Hicks


UPDATE:
I mostly tried to polish the language and elaborate on a few things.  I also scratched the original non-beginning for one which I like better and expanded upon a few key points (ie, why I want to teach, some of my interests, and my childhood).