Narrative on Attending a Speech by Ira Berlin -- Slavery

Narrative It was 2:23 on a Friday afternoon. Normally, at this time, I would have been missing my Computer Science lecture. But by a strange and, dare I call it convenient, twist of fate, the professor?s father died a couple days ago and the class was canceled. Not that it would have made a difference; I was prepared to skip the lecture and attend another given by Ira Berlin, a distinguished Mellon Senior Scholar, entitled Rethinking Slavery: 1800-1861. I walked through the entrance to 213 Gregory Hall, the room in which the lecture was to be given, and entered a completely empty room. To the best of my knowledge, the lecture was supposed to start at 2:30, which puzzled me. I figured that maybe it was rescheduled to a later time, and I?d stick around for a while until I got bored enough to leave. I seized the opportunity to choose my seat wisely. The room was divided into two major groups of seats, oriented in columns. Each column was seven seats wide and 10 seats deep. And there were a few seats lined up along the windows in the back as well, providing an approximate capacity of 150 persons, I estimated. My thought process was that I was here to observe the people more than the lecture. I also analyzed the fact that I don?t like history and concluded that if I sat in front, to see and hear the professor with greater ease, I would either bore myself or I wouldn?t understand. And since both of those were scenarios that ev entually resulted in my narrative being terrible, I decided to try my luck in the back. Two minutes passed before two more entered the room. They were two men, young enough to be students. The first had white skin, and wore a T-Shirt, a cap, and a metallic watch similar... ... made my way out. I had sat is that seat for over 2 hours and 10 minutes. My legs needed stretched, and I had a taste for a Big-Mac. What was the point of that lecture? For me, it was for a grade in Rhetoric 105, but I was probably a minority. It puzzled me that the lecture was open to the public, yet the average Joe, unless I have seriously overestimated my intelligence, would have no idea what Berlin was talking about. I go to lectures and classes in order to learn something, but I learned nothing here. Berlin spent a good 45 minutes bombarding me with new information, but he obviously assumed that the audience already knew things that I didn?t, because I comprehended none of the material. The only conclusion I could make was that, in order to understand what Berlin was saying, you had to already be familiar with the material that Berlin was covering.