Freshman orientation week at Emory includes the planting of a tree on campus in honor of the entering class. At my class's tree ceremony, the president of the university gave a brief speech, then invited anyone who wanted to step up to the microphone and read or recite any tree-related writing that we wanted. Right now, I'm throwing up in my mouth at the thought of such horrific cheesiness. But not seven years ago! No, bright-eyed, excited-to-start-college, seventeen-year-old LaKedra stepped right up to that microphone and recited the poem below. That's right folks: with no prior notice, I was ready and willing to recite, from memory, a poem about trees. And that is why I was still getting my lunch money stolen as a college student.

Loveliest of Trees
A.E. Housman

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

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Happy National Poetry Month!!!

I got this really sweet email today--

Subj: With Admiration!

"To The Freshmen Organic Class of 2002"

I would like to extend my warmest "Congratulations" to each and everyone of you for all the achievements and success that you have enjoyed during your College career. You belong to the second generation of a one time "freshmen group" who dared to come into my classroom, and proved to me convincingly how truly gifted some of the students that come to Emory really are.

In addition to the names honored with this message, I would like to mention the names of those who who left the College earlier: [a list including my orgo lab partner, who annoyed me but may have actually known it all, and several other people who I didn't know graduated early. No wonder I haven't been seeing them around.]

This summer I will embark in the recruiting of our sixth freshmen class, and just like the classes that followed yours, they will most definitely join in the tradition of high academic standards and unique personal relationships that were set by the "Freshman class of 2002".

With my perennial admiration, and my best wishes for not only a most rewarding professional career, but also a fulfilled personal life!

Jose.

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That's from Dr. Soria, who taught me organic chemistry my first semester here, and was on my thesis committee for my last semester. He's a great guy, and I'm sure he's a great professor. I say "I'm sure" because my perspective on the matter is skewed. I was nowhere near ready for his style of teaching during my first semester. I went to a challenging high school, but we had graded homework. After doing all the assignments, I would study, at maximum, one hour for a test and half and hour for a quiz. And I did wonderfully. One semester junior year, I had a GPA of 5.0.

I entered Emory with a fundamental misconception of the value of homework. I thought it only existed to be graded, and didn't realize that by doing all the assignments I was actually practicing the concepts I'd learned. I was a dumb freshman. Anyway, we didn't have homework in freshman orgo. So I never cracked open the book, except for that half hour for quizzes and hour for exams.

You'd think the first time I got a 32%, I'd have thought, "Maybe I'm doing something wrong." Oh no. It was more like, "I'm LaKedra, I'm brilliant, why is this guy such a bad teacher?" So I kept on doing absolutely nothing outside of class. Then I'd go to lectures, where Dr. Soria would explain concepts in a way that probably made things very clear for those who'd done the readings and practiced on their own. To me, it seemed that he was drawing random things on the board, soliciting random guesses, and moving on. I was so frustrated. I was so dumb!

I got a B- that first semester, which... whoa. But it still wasn't my fault, and I was really glad when Dr. Soria was replaced by Dr. Goldsmith for the second semester of freshman orgo. Goldsmith didn't give homework either, but his lecture style was more accessible to those who hadn't done the reading. Maybe it was that small thing that led to my epiphany. I could begin to understand the concepts just from lecture, so it encouraged me to work on my own to fully grasp the material. As opposed to never beginning to understand, and so never trying. I started to spend a lot more time doing practice problems and examples from the book. Or maybe it was just the fear of getting another B-, I dunno. I got an A- that semester, and my GPA never looked back (until stat mech).

I asked Dr. Soria to be on my Honors committee because I wanted him to see that I did get a clue, and was no longer this dumb, entitled freshman with no sense of initiative. I've grown a lot since then, and he was a big part of that.

In high school, I was known for my “quote section”. It was a required part of our English notebooks in 10th grade English. We were supposed to write down inspiring stuff, beautiful words, and things like that. Of course, I immediately started writing down stupid things people said. This continued for the rest of high school, yielding quite an impressive collection. I made an attempt to continue here at Emory, but for some reason or another, I didn’t keep up with it. I wasn’t the LJ addict that I am now, and I think I was too busy trying to adjust to college to keep a paper journal with any regularity. So those quotes are basically the only record I have of that year. So here are the memories that one set of quotes stirred up, with the actual quotes scattered throughout.

iMovie Fest has evolved into Campus MovieFest, sponsored by Delta and is a bigass deal. But it was brand new when I was a freshman, and each floor of each freshman building made a movie. I guess you could call us trailblazers. It was fun to make, but the final product was horrible!! I’m so glad that they didn’t show all the movies like they do now.

The premise of my hall's movie was that this redneck family visits Emory for a tour. Unfortunately, the script has been lost to the ages. I have a version of it on this computer, but it’s just the ideas I wrote. Other people came up with stuff and we put it all together, in addition to doing some stuff on the fly. I was in the movie, but I don’t even remember if I was Cletus or Grampa Jed! Mana played the tour guide, Kellie. I want to say that casibeth was Mabel, the prospective student. It's probably fair to say that this was not our brightest moment.

One of the first jokes was about all the campus organizations known by acronyms.

KELLIE: I’m a junior in the college, with a double major in IDS and NBB with a minor in AAS. Activity-wise, I’m a member of SGA, SPC, RHA, BSA and ISC. [cheery smile]
CLETUS: We’re gonna be spending a whole lotta money on this school, and she ain’t gonna learn no more than her alphabet??

Actually, finding that line makes me pretty sure I was Cletus.

Another gag was that "Kellie" lacked the crucial tour guide skill of walking backwards. We had to do a lot of takes for those mishaps. One shot, between White Hall and the Administration building, was tough because she had to keep looking back to see the thing she was supposed to be running into.

A little later, the pre-frosh hears some students talking about a party at The Library (a nightclub), and pictures a party going on in the actual library. That shot of people in clubbing clothes dancing through the stacks was actually our best clip, and made it into the montage on Movie Fest night.

The last quote I have from the actual film makes fun of the nicknames for a couple of buildings on campus: "First you showed us the DUC, now the WoodPEC..y’all sure do like y’all’s birds!" I don't remember if I wrote that line, or if I just had to say it, but...yeah. Not our brightest moment.

And then, filming was done, and Amy B. and I spent hours and hours editing that bad boy. The task was made more difficult because we had to use a Mac and Macs suck in every way:

Me: WHAT ARE YOU DOING???!!!
Amy B: SOMETHING I’M ABOUT TO UNDO!

I don’t remember if there was some weird rule that all the people on your hall had to be in the movie, but I remember fighting to cut a couple of people from the film completely because their scene was pointless. "I am NOT about to sacrifice the integrity of my film so that every bum on this hall can be in it!!"

On the big night, one of the floors in Trimble Hall won, with “Requiem for a Dorm”. It was basically an exact recreation of Requiem for a Dream, done in five minutes with Easy Mac instead of drugs. I hated it. But I remember being told that I would have really liked it, if I’d seen the actual movie. I was deeply offended, because their movies was only good if you’d seen the real thing. Meanwhile, our movie was pure, stand-alone, comedy gold. I seriously thought that. I don't know what I was smoking at the time, but I've quit now.