To Make a Better World

It’s a normal day at school, I walk into Physics class at 11:20 and sit down waiting for my teacher. The thing about Physics though, is that two days a week (on Wednesday and Friday) it starts an hour earlier for two hours of class. Having a schedule that isn’t the same hour every day can be confusing and tends to throw people off (it even threw me off last quarter, and I never get mixed up with consistent things, especially in the middle of the quarter.)

I sit down in my chair and start chatting with my friends at my table - they look over the lab I brought to be turned in, we talk a little bit about our project, and then the two geeks at the table start going off about computer games and Game of Thrones stuff.

It’s 11:30. Class is supposed to start, but our professor isn’t there. Sara is a smart cookie, punctual, and funny. But never late to walk in the door. Never. Of the 60-some-odd classes I’ve had with her since the beginning of the year, she’s never been late.

11:35 rolls around, and we start getting worried - we start talking about it at our table. Her unexplained absence has us mystified. “Maybe she’s answering somebody’s question in her office.” Leyia suggests to me across the table, but I don’t think that’s so - she would still keep aware of the time and be here when she needs to be.

11:40, and I’m certain she forgot it’s Friday, that class is an hour earlier. I start getting a bad feeling inside my chest - somebody should go get her. Now her lateness is the only thing all the 28 people in the room are thinking and talking about. Most of us know her quite well, all of us know what’s happening. As the seconds tick by on the clock, I start feeling worse and worse. I want to go, but I haven’t been to her office before, I don’t go to my Professor’s offices unless it’s absolutely necessary, which it almost never is. I ask multiple times if somebody will go with me, but the answer is always “no, you go!”

11:45, and all the people at one of the tables leaves. Connor, a guy who sat at my table last quarter, gets up and starts writing times on the board: predictions of when she would arrive. There’s 11:50, 12:05, 12:20, 12:25, 12:15, 12:00…I shake my head. It’s not right, I need to go get her. “What’s your prediction?” He asks.
“I don’t have a prediction.” I reply curtly.
“No, really! What do you think? When do you think she’s gonna show up?” Connor persists.
Now the attention of the room is on me. I know what I need to do - everybody in the room knows what somebody should do, but nobody else seems to be willing to do it. I’ve been fighting myself whether or not to for the last fifteen minutes, but at that moment I find resolve.
“I’m gonna go get her.” I state. The reactions around me are varied: a few protest outright, a couple spur me on, most just sit and watch amused.
“No, don’t do that!” Alex, the guy at my table who knows way to much about computer games and Games of Thrones protests. I look at him. I look around the room. Everybody watching me, waiting to see if I would do what we all knew was the right thing to do.

I look around the room, mortified. My brain screams, Aren’t we all adults here? Aren’t you all paying alot of money to be here? Without hesitation, I would bet all the money I have that I am the youngest person in the class, by a couple of years. I’m a Running Start student so I don’t have to pay for classes, but nobody else is, they’re all paying $12.57 or $32.80 per class session (depending on their residency), some pretty solid money. Besides, I don’t want to waste an hour that could be spent learning - besides, if we throw it away we’ll have to catch up with it later, or skip some possibly very important things at a later point. I’m sure everybody knows it. They all have been through at least Calculus III and the prior two Physics classes to be sitting there. Everybody’s smart, everybody knows what to do. But they don’t.

“Will anyone come with me?” I plead on more time, my juvenile insecurities showing themselves one last time.
“No! Go get her!” Leyia scoffs. I look around the room for help, but there is none to be had.With final resolve, I get off my chair and start toward the door. “Fine. I’m going to get her.” It’s about 11:47 by this point.
“No, don’t! You’ll invalidate all the predictions if you do that!” Alex cries after me, the gaze of the whole class following me.
I turn as I walk out the door, my hand stretching to point an accusing finger at him. “Screw you.” And all the rest of you too, I think.

I walk the couple of hundred yards up to the offices. I’d never been to Sara’s office, but I find the door open - she’s sitting in front of her computer chatting with people on Facebook or something.
I poke my head in the door. “It’s Friday.”
She hardly looks up.
“It’s Friday.” I repeat, with a little more emphasis.
“Yes, it’s Friday. Be happy!” She says.
I want to do a “*Facepalm*” at this point, but I’m too focused to do so. “It’s Friday.”
She looks at me, confused. She’s not getting it. I thought she would! Enough games, time to be straight-forward.
“It’s Friday. Come to class?”
I love seeing ‘lightbulb moments’ on people’s faces, and the transition from confusion to denial to realization spreading across her face was priceless. She quickly moved her head to look at the time on the corner of her computer screen as it sinks in. In her peculiar Iranian accent she says two phrases I’ve heard many times before, but not together. “Oh my God, thank you!” She stands up, grabs her bag and we start back to the classroom.
“I never do that, and I just got back from my last class about 10 minutes ago because they were asking me a bunch of questions and I totally forgot! Thank you for getting me!”
We chat for the two minutes it takes to get to the classroom. I open the door for her and walk in behind her - partially smug, partially relieved and happy. The smugness completely uncalled for, but it was a good feeling to stand up for the right thing.

It was funny and kind of cool, to have to go get her, one of my favorite and most admired professors, for a silly thing like forgetting, it’s something I shan’t forget.
But at the same time I’m left with a bad taste in my mouth, per se. That nobody else in the room did it before me. Maybe I’m still young and idealistic? An overachiever? Whatever the case, I don’t think it’s something to just be excused and blown off. Maybe I’m weird, but I want to learn, and spend time in class. If it was my Public Speaking or English 101 classes that I didn’t get anything out of I wouldn’t care or get the professor if they were late. But this is Physics. Important, real-life stuff that’s relevant to every single person taking it. Nobody is there that doesn’t want to be. So why and how could they just let an important hour slip idly by?

I stood at the end of the line, with one of my best friends next to me. All around me were hundreds of other kids within two years of my own age (most older than me), including the one I knew who was next to me. I was there and it was about to start, but I still didn’t know what to expect. I was still nervous, and honestly my head was empty, only open, wondering, nervous, a touch scared…my parents weren’t with me, there was nobody around me that I knew save one. Then they opened it up, the line started moving. We gave them our Enrollment Verification forms, got a nametag and then a number. I walked into the cafeteria of the college among the hubbub of all the people in the room and went to the number of table I had been given. Then it really started. But it was like an information fair. Tables around the room with a person behind each one with a little snippet talk about something, and every five minutes you go to the next table. I started to breathe and relax. This isn’t so bad, I thought. In reality, it went smoothly. But then they started pounding things into your head - “It’s alot different from highschool.” “College classes take a years’ worth of high-school course work and put it into 90 days….90 days, you got that?” “You should be studying two hours each week for every credit you get.” But for some reason I didn’t get freaked out at all. It seemed pretty natural. Everything did, actually, even up to going home and signing up for classes. It wasn’t like a freight train. I didn’t get clobbered, or smashed, or anything, with the sudden, “OhmygoshI'mactuallygoingtocollegeaaaahhhhhhh!!!” It just happened, like I’ve been desensitized to it or something…so life goes, I suppose. So I’m going to college next year. I’m moving on with life, with not very much pomp, circumstance, or ceremony…..here goes nothing again?