crossing borders

Tomorrow I submit my grades for the Spring 2012 semester, and when I do, the academic year will be over.   It’s been an interesting year.  I taught eight sections (three in the fall and five in the spring), and classes ranged from first-year composition (first and second semesters), a computers and writing course, and four sections of an American literature survey.  I appreciated the variety of courses and the students: I always appreciate the students at this university.  The students are highly diverse in race, ethnicity, ability, religion, sexual orientation, social class . . . I love the variety of perspectives and voices.

What I would do differently if I had the year to do again?

• As always, I’d stay more organized.  I love the idea of “going with flow” on some days and when I do this, we invariably get off schedule, and students tend to hate being off schedule.  They ultimately learn to be OK with it, but being off schedule does cause them some anxiety, and anxiety is not what I’m going for when I shift the schedule– I’m looking for the students to be a bit more flexible and spontaneous– but I do need to be more aware of how my shifting desires for the course affect the students.
• I shouldn’t have used the course management system.  It was a huge time suck.  CMS is not using technology in the classroom. The CMS the university used– a very common one– is awfully clunky and I didn’t have the time or energy to fight it.  Next time, I’ll return to the use of blogs as CMS as a place for discussions, course calendars, links to course readings, and announcements.  In the future, I also won’t use a CMS to keep up with student grades.  I do better with an Excel spreadsheet, and frankly, students can keep up with their own grades.
• I had so many students this term that keeping up with attendance in each class was a pain.  In the future– if I have this number of students again– I will change my attendance policy.  I’m thinking I won’t have one.  But then, I’ll have a participation grade that will made or break someone’s overall semester score.  A student wouldn’t be able to pass the course if she/he never showed up for class.  I’ll rethink this a bit and tweak the idea, but I’m tired of hearing absence excuses.  Many of the reasons for missing class are legitimate, but students don’t seem to understand that their personal business isn’t my personal business.  I don’t need to know all the reasons they have for being away from school.

Things that worked well:

• I learned (again) that I’m a natural facilitator, and that I have a concrete ability to get people to talk.  Maybe this is because I ask students real questions.  Maybe this is because I listen to their answers.  Maybe this is because I don’t let them off the hook by letting them say, “I don’t know.”  They do know.
• I have an ability to create a safe space for students.  Just this semester (and this is a recurring theme in my years of teaching), I had students come out, tell me about the abuses in their lives, tell me about goals they’d not mentioned to anyone else, about who they want to become.  I always feel so honored that they share with me.  (To be fair, most professors have these kinds of student disclosures.  I do tend to have many of them, though, almost every semester.)
• I treated the American literature survey courses as discussion group for the same course.  I had four sections of the same course, all on the same MWF schedule.  If students couldn’t attend their assigned section, they could come to any of the other three, as we covered the same material in each class.  For the most part, this worked out well (keeping up with papers was hard), but students really like the flexibility to shift between classes.  They learned the material, but they also learned a lot about classroom dynamics and how each class is very different from the others.

The students I won’t forget:

I remember most students after the semester ends.  I don’t always remember their full names, but I do remember their faces, where they sat in the classroom, and some of the things they said or did.

• The student last semester who laughed all term (about silly things) but worked his /her butt off to produce quality writing.
• The former professional baseball player who was clearly smarter than me.
• The skateboarder who sailed around campus, effortlessly.
• The youth pastor who was committed to working  with disadvantaged youth in a foreign country.
• The student who was undergoing cancer treatments throughout the semester but who rarely missed class and who always had interesting perspectives on the work we were doing.
• The multiple students who were military reservists (or active military) who balanced their work lives, their military lives, their families, and their academic work with seemingly flawless skill.
• The student who attended my high school (years after I was there).
• The student who made me black and white origami cranes on a string . . . as a symbol of Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Blackbird.”
• The student who kept making jokes about essentialism . . . (you’d have to have been there, but trust me: it was funny)
• The foreign student I had in two classes this year– both writing classes– and how his/her writing improved dramatically over the span of 32 weeks.
• The student who never wanted to speak out loud in class but who wrote eloquently detailed essays, essays filled with insights and thoughtfulness.
• The student athletes who were funny and clever:  the volleyball player and the five track runners.
• The actor, the musician, the whistler, the photographer, the body builder, the frat boy, the artist, the seniors, the first-year students, the computer savvy, and technology challenged, the autoworker, the widow.

The semester is over.  It was good overall, not always smooth and flawless, but good.  We survived, all of us, challenged and affected.  I know students were changed by the work we did; they learned course content and improved as writers.  They met course outcomes.  That’s the goal, right?  But I changed, too.  I always do.  As much as I want to leave this profession sometimes, I come to the end of a semester or a year, and I look back to where we were and how far we’ve come, and I realize:  I am doing what I’m meant to do.