Homeschool Moment

Confession: when I arrived at college my freshman year, I did not know what double spacing was, nor that papers were supposed to be double spaced.

My first paper of college was assigned in Freshman Seminar. The professor handed out the assignment, which included specifics of formatting. I do not now remember the topic of that paper, just that the formatting instructions included that it should be 2 pages in length, 12 point Times New Roman or Arial font, and that it should be double spaced.

I stared at the page in front of me. Double spaced? what on earth was that? I looked around the room, and no one seemed to have any problems with the assignment, and I was too embarrassed to ask what double spacing meant.

Later I sat in front of my computer, staring at the blank page in Microsoft Word, wondering how to begin. It was, after all, my first paper of college. I wanted it to be good. I wanted to be (at least somewhat) eloquent. I wanted… I wanted to know how to double space.

I figured out pretty quickly that double spacing meant to leave a line blank in between each line of text, but knew that there had to be an easier way than hitting ‘enter’ after every line. I glanced surreptitiously at a classmate’s computer and saw that she was typing and did not have to hit enter after every line, but Word cleverly left spaces in between the text for her. At least my hunch about leaving a blank line between text was correct! Now to figure out how Word magically does that for you….

It took a good 20-30 minutes to discover the paragraph setting, but at long last, just when I was almost prepared to admit my ignorance and ask for help, I found it! Oh the triumph of that moment. Now it was time to start the paper, after losing half an hour of my life to the formatting search.

Looking back, it is strange to me that I never learned how to double space in high school, but it is one of those funny things that got left out when I was writing papers in high school English as a homeschooler. I suppose of things to be left out of one’s education, it is a mere blip on the radar. Also, it meant that it would be two years of college before I wrote a paper that rivaled the actual length of my longest high school paper.

My senior year of high school, I studied American history, and my final project was to write a research paper on a president — any president. Since I was the oldest, my paper had to be the longest: 10 pages.

Remember please that I was unaware of the joys of double spacing. Yes, my paper was actually around 20 pages long. This is why I picked Franklin D. Roosevelt as my subject. I wish I could go back and read that paper, in all its single spaced glory.