Today is most likely my very last day teaching humanities 1100, a course I’ve put hour upon hour preparing, rethinking, restrategizing, hoping to engage students’ minds. My pedagogical creativity will be gone, only faint nostalgia. Sure it will remain in my head but without future students awaiting the arguments, the evidence, the connections . . . who really cares about the carefully crafted rhetorical parallels between Patton’s address to the 3rd army, King Harry’s St Crispin Day’s speech, and Lt. Col. Kilgore’s “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”?
Teaching: A series of intensely personal encounters; all along you know they won’t last but still you both furtively and openly grasp at each soul in your class. You obsess, you see their faces before you finally sleep, you plan every little detail of the perfect evening. Later, after it’s all over you pass a familiar face between buildings AD and TB, your eyes avert—it’s too much, too much familiarity in an unfamiliar context, to see one another again. On another day, a different devotee, your eyes meet: you acknowledge the past relationship—“Hello”—but you can’t recall when you embraced this student’s ideas, nor even if it was 1010, 2030, or 1050.
How are you?
Fine.
How’s the semester going?
Busy.
Good luck at the U.
The old ardor isn’t there; you both know it’s over, the meaning can’t be resuscitated. One more face in the long line of adulterous affairs.
Today the campus seems mined with remembrances of relationships ended, but also new unfamiliar and unaware conquests I will, I must, I’m required to make.
8 comments:
See my post for more on the same topic. It is a kind of intimacy, isn't it.
I like the affair metaphor. But sometimes I feel like I'm having an affair with the students and they are not having affairs with me. It is intimate, and sometimes I feel like I'm being used. But last week, when the plagiarizer (sorry, can't spell) looked me in the eye (he may have been teary) and said, in heavily accented English, "I'm sorry", I did feel like I had crossed some invisible line. It's a weird job, a cross between psychologist, social worker, career counselor and "expert." My first semester teaching I felt like a fraud. Now I have to remind myself where they are, and where I am relative to them. I don't think I got too emotionally involved this semester. I may have been too overwhelmed. But I do think it probably helps to have a long term plan. I still remember some of my students from WWU, those little innocent freshman.
In relationship terms, I may now be emotionally unavailable.
I'm not unavailable, but I have figured out, I think, what the appropriate forms of love are. And how to protect myself from caring too much.
caring too much--I've been burned there esp when I taught at the alternative high school. But I also worry about being emotionally unavailable as I might miss a meaningful moment.
this semester I've been completely distant from my students. On the last day of class, I found myself a little baffled that we'd actually had an entire semester together. was I there? did I prepare lessons? who are you people? it's been a busy and overwhelming few months, and sadly my teaching suffered. i usually feel a pang of loss on the last day of class, but this time around, not much of anything. it was weird.
I'm selective with my intimacy. I'll miss a handful of students this semester, students with whom I developed some kind of real connection. A handful is enough.
I feel jaded: I keep students at a distance now and just think in terms of intellectual advance. I will say, however, this semesters class has been engaging and I see real improvement in their writing. Will I miss them? Nope. Not a jot.
how's that for honesty!
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