My Master's Exam is this Monday. I'm a bit nervous. It's an entirely comprehensive exam and I'm afraid that when I actually sit down with the pen and the legal pad I'll freak out, not write anything of sense and walk out of the exam half finished. Now, I believe that my common sense is strong enough to keep this from happening, but really- I'm not positive. This is the big one- the time that I really don't have space to mess up, start over, reload, etc. This is a one time affair (unless I want to take the exam again...which I might).

Anyway- so that's happening monday. On top of that I'm still a little miffed by the fact that no one seems to be interested in hiring people who have their Master's degree. Doesn't that seem strange? I remember when i first started college- grad school seemed like this alternate world (and in some ways it is...) where only the people who are REALLY smart can even THINK about going. My dad called me this morning and told me that he had gotten his master's this week in captain's school (for large watercraft). You see? The term "master" holds no water anymore. I will be a "master" in less than 2 months...and frankly, I don't feel that much different from my roommate who opted out of grad school. I may have been able to prolong the fantasy of the student lifestyle longer than she was able to...but am I really to be considered a master for this?
This is not to discredit the many things that I have learned over the last year. Actually...I haven't really learned all that much. I've spent the last year of my educational life learning to speak the lingo of higher academia. I suppose that if I stuck around a couple more years for the PhD...I might actually learn something. At this point, however, the lingo I've spent this time and energy acquiring will be lost on the ears of my future HighSchool students. Now, learning more about Shakespeare, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Joyce...these would be good things to take to the classroom...but the swarthy words of the over-educated, underpaid, liberal humanists in the Literature department (while I do consider myself one of them in most cases) cannot be worthy of mastery!

What are graduate Literature departments in our schools really trying to do? Our professors are space cadets or egocentric politicians- our classes go untaught and our most valiant efforts (even without the benefit of good teaching and positive role models) pass through our professors' hands with a smack-- a curt "you're not trying hard enough," or a fuming "you are no longer an undergraduate- I do not know why you insist on writing like one"...and we are shot out into the darkness of academia to try and find a light switch in the middle of this darkened room with the din of restrained voices all around working out the theories that we will next be shoved into and wrung out the other end of in the name of education.

My name is Suzanne. I am nearly a master. Not of literature, but of the art of talking as an academic in the university (with a minor in name dropping). I may as well have spent the entire year in the teacher's lounge of the department picking up bits and pieces of information, rather than toiling away in class and at the library, writing papers for my professors to dismiss as poorly written and not political enough, and ignorant of my professors' own political diatribes. What is one to say?

"I believe that the ontological epistemology of the centered democratic narrator in this novel demonstrates the varying levels of interpellated pleasure donned by the first-person account in the penultimate chapter of the novel. Under closer examination we should be able to deconstruct the socially determined nature of the foucauldian dynamic between these two personnas."

Still a little rough around the edges...but I'm just standing on the fringes of the green, spacious land of the Master's club. Here I am, talking the talk and walking the walk all the way to the green coat- the funny stoll in blue? or is it black? I can't remember...