Back to Tulane: First day of class
Richy Leitner was about to begin his second year at Tulane University late last summer when Hurricane Katrina disrupted his life and academics. He's back in New Orleans as the university prepares to reopen its classrooms.
Thursday was a sad day for every Tulane student. Just when we were starting to get into the flow of life in New Orleans, the university goes and throws everything out of whack by telling us that we need to start attending classes. And to add insult to injury, it is making us spend hundreds of dollars on overpriced books for these classes. It boggles my mind to try to imagine how a music theory book bound in the plastic ring style of a first-grade book report manages to merit a market value of $81. I guess this whole class baloney is to be expected. I think almost all colleges try to pull something like this eventually. But regardless of the injustice, we are entering a new stage of our return to New Orleans in that we will now have to start learning.
I had three classes today: criminology, music theory, and intro to personality. There are some classes being offered now relating to what is going on in New Orleans, but I decided to stick with basically what I had planned to take last semester. Every day, we hear enough about the hurricane and the devastation for my taste.
All the teachers seemed very excited about having students to teach again. They all talked about how nice it was to be back in front of students again and not just hanging around their houses doing nothing in a ghost town. One teacher said it was nice to see the students back and acting the same way Tulane students always used to act. I hope more people share his opinion about our influence on the city. I think that the vast majority of the teachers here returned after the storm; they seemed bored just waiting for the semester to start.
None of my teachers spoke too extensively about the hurricane, although one suggested that the city should use the areas destroyed by the hurricane as tourist attractions, despite the somewhat morbid nature of such an idea. It's an interesting idea, because there are already tourists coming to see the devastation sites, and people obviously watch this kind of thing on TV. Maybe it would bring some tourists in.
There needs to be some way of sealing off some of the areas that are probably not going to be repopulated anyway. But regardless of whether New Orleans becomes Apocalypse Land, today marked a pretty big step on our quest to becoming normal college students again.
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