AS I WALK into Old Main 13 at 1:10 on a Saturday afternoon, my students are already deep in conversation on Toni Morrison's Beloved. When I break into their discussion to start class, the students immediately start to tell me about their responses to the week's reading. Their enthusiastic interest makes the three-and-a half hours we will spend together fly by. When class meets every other weekend, the hours always seem too short for the lecture and discussion that need to fit into the afternoon.

I have taught in Weekend College for the past four years and find adult returning students a joy to teach. My students demonstrate strong motivation to keep up with assignments and attend class. Additionally, they bring their life experience to the classroom, which serves to enrich discussion. In my Women and Fiction class, which meets evenings and has both day and Weekend College students, the weekend students' voices add a much-needed perspective to the discussion. While most traditional students read about women's life stages with the eyes of daughters, the weekend students add the perspective of mothers and sometimes grandmothers to the classroom. Their voices enrich discussion by helping the day students to understand character motivation that may have puzzled them initially.

Adult students also tend to reserve judgment while reading, which allows them to become fully engaged in the characters they meet in fiction and the arguments they encounter in essays. Of course weekend students come with as wide an array of personal, political, and religious beliefs as any group of students does, but they also have encountered more people with other beliefs in both their work and daily lives. Because of this, weekend students generally acknowledge the ways in which their own experience has informed their ideas. Rather than offering peer comments that simply disregard the position another student has taken when writing an essay, the weekend student tends to write, "You have a different opinion on this topic than I do. You could make your point more convincing by considering counterarguments." As I look at the comments the students write for each other, I always appreciate this willingness to consider others' viewpoints.

Many Weekend College students take literature classes for the purpose of fulfilling general education requirements. Oftentimes students mention this as their primary reason for taking my class in the letter I ask them to write on the first day of class. Yet, despite signing up for the class primarily to fill a requirement, these students generally turn out to be as motivated as the English majors in the classroom. Most of the students take notes and ask questions about American transcendentalism or the elements of fiction just as if they were majoring in English instead of planning on furthering their career at 3M, Medtronic, or American Express. By the end of the course, I find students writing that they enjoyed reading the fiction and plan on making more time to read when they finish college. Others write of a theme the course emphasized, such as American pastoralism, and mention that they will continue to look for this theme when they read on their own.

My students' interest in learning about other views of culture and acquiring knowledge simply because it enriches one's life adds to my enjoyment in teaching Weekend College. As the discussion of Beloved ends because we have run out of time rather than running out of topics to explore, a student remarks that the afternoon has been like going to a book club. I know that the students are walking away with new knowledge about literary allusion, narrative technique, and African American culture and history. My student's remark also makes me realize that they are leaving with a sense of a community built through engagement in reading and studying books.

Joan Thompson is an assistant professor in the English Department, who teaches in both the day program and Weekend College.