In the Blink of an Eye by Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf

Author:Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1595911209
Publisher: Produced by Melcher Media
Published: 2022-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

I was still frustrated by my performance in the classroom at LSU. Like everything else, habits have to be formed to make them consistent. I just could not develop the habit of pushing myself academically. I couldn’t call on my basketball discipline and apply it to my schoolwork. I would get mad at myself and vow to be better, especially at the start of each semester.

Man, I’m gonna try to be an A student this semester. Man, I’m going to really buckle down and get my work done.

I would start out with the best of intentions, but just like in high school I wouldn’t be able to sustain it. It actually confounded me. I would scold myself all the time: Man, you can go out there and shoot a basketball in all sorts of weather conditions. You can wake up in the dark and shoot for hours at a time. For years. What’s wrong with you—why can’t you apply that focus to school?

At some point during my freshman year, when asked to declare a major, I put down business management, which was a typical major for an athlete. But I never took any classes toward the major. There were many aspects of my academic career that I would prefer to forget. When I first got on campus, school administrators brought me upstairs in one of the academic buildings and put me through an experience that I found humiliating. A white woman told me to sit down. She handed me a book, pointed to a passage, and asked me to read it. It didn’t take me long to figure out what was going on: they were checking to see if I could read and how I read. Was I just reciting words, or could I define them and think through the material? I was stunned. Like, really?

I made it through the passage smoothly, pronouncing the words correctly, getting into a nice flow. So far, so good. Anybody listening would think, Oh, this guy has this under control. But then she started asking me questions about what I had read. Comprehension had never been my strong suit. With the Tourette perpetually distracting me, I often had to read paragraphs several times to get their meaning.

“What does this word mean?” she asked, pointing to a word in the passage.

“Oh. Um, I don’t know.”

“Okay. What does this word mean?” She pointed again. “I don’t know,” I responded.

“What about this?”

I felt the nervous perspiration starting to build up. It was a familiar feeling: shame. I was embarrassed, like I was being exposed as the fraud that I often felt I was. After the third question, my whole demeanor changed. I got a bit hostile.

“Well, what can you tell me about the story?” she asked. “What did you get out of the story?”

I was just reading. I wasn’t even thinking about what I had been reading. I could have tried to comprehend more as I read, but it wasn’t my focus. Asked to read aloud, I was trying to get that right.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.