First class

I had my first copyediting class last night. It was a strange experience, due partly to the flakey,
one-foot-in-another-dimension aspect to the teacher, partly due to it being from six to nine-thirty, after an eight hour work day, and I didn't get enough sleep the night before and also was shit-ass drunk right before bed.
In a way, it was the most honest, frank introduction to a class and a field I've eve had at any school. The teacher explained, in her round about, meandering way, that she had gotten started as a copyeditor for math and science text books, then gone on to magazines and eventually fiction, now she's a writer, an English and editing professor at Emerson and a freelance copyeditor. She explained that the class is basically just something to be got through so you can say you have a certificate, which you can sue to fake your way into our first job. You'll be faking it because at your first job you'll have a whole different set of rules than what I'll be teaching you, but that's just how it works. As she was talking, she clearly has no particular interest in copyediting as a field it's merely a means to an end, something that allows how her pay for writing and reading and gardening, which are what she actually gets excited for. The whole evening was a far cry from the pomposity and ego-stroking that came with every other school I've ever gone to, or heard about from friends. No mention of notions of purity, no looking down our noses at "ordinary people" who go to "State Schools," (this spat contemptuously from the mouth like a morsel of rotten meat...Sorry, I've been reading Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier.
The people in the class seemed like a bunch of fusty grammar nerds. Which I don't have much of an interest in, but it is a nice change after the vigorously unliterary guys I work with. Some of them are actually really smart (in the mailroom, I mean), like Keith and Russell, but they're just the kind of guys that would consider "being an intellectual" pretentious and self-defeating. I feel a certain duty as an educated, somewhat priveleged person to try to get through to people like that, smart people who feel they have a certain place, and that certain things, like college, are either denied them or wasteful. I feel I have an obligation to let these guys see that most "intellectuals" are interested in making the lives of normal people better, not in looking condescendinlyg at them.