When I started writing about my experiences in this new school, I was a man in a class of sixteen students. That might not sound like a whole great big army of pupils, but it sure felt like it. When you think of a classroom in a regular university, you’re picturing a teacher lecturing a mass of students listening and taking notes. It’s a quiet setting that you’re picturing in your mind, where everything is nice and organized and people pay attention. It’s higher education, the students are more adult than child, and things are accomplished.

Then there’s hair school.

Hair school is nothing at all like the serene and mature setting you would picture as representative of higher education. In a lot of instances, even university classes can miss this mark, but not quite so profoundly as in hair school.

In hair school there is a lot of talking. A lot. A whole lot. Talking during class about the topic at hand. Talk during class NOT about said topics. It’s a social classroom, basically. In the best case scenarios that means it’s an open, laid-back and supportive environment. However, in the WORST case scenarios, it’s a loud, unruly, unorganized, frequently-hijacked stream of consciousness that is one part girl-party, one part A.D.D., and one part non-productive “Look-At-ME!!”

Some days I am amazed I learned anything at all in those classes, but somehow I did. Somehow a good many of us did. Perhaps if we had a smaller class it could have been managed more easily, and less prone to running off the rails like a train filled with stupid.

Now, seven months later, our class has drastically changed. We are more productive and supportive than we ever have been. This is due, in part, to the liquidation of a large portion of our volume. We’re not even completely sure where they all went to, but we are down to nearly half our original size. One problem student was expelled, two took a leave of absence and then re-enrolled in a later class, and two just kinda vanished one day. Of the remaining eleven classmates, two or three pretty much come and go as they please, and won’t be graduating with the rest of us. That leaves eight students, of the original sixteen, who will be with us from start to finish.

That is some crazy shrinkage, but I wish we had been able to trim those numbers down from the beginning. Early classes would have been a lot more smooth and more productive had we separated the wheat from the chaff during the second or third week. Whatever the reasons for the drastic reduction, I’m fairly happy with the remaining students. We work well together, and we can rely on each other. Only four more months left, I wonder how many of these students I’ll ever see again?