What a Long, Strange Trip

With a bit over a week to go in the semester, I am ready for and looking forward to an extended break. My students, too, are ready, and I do not hold this against them. They have suffered through 240 minutes a week of my standing in front of the classroom ostensibly there to enlighten them about the secret to good writing. Fat chance. Instead I have told them that the secret to good writing is spending a lot of time practicing it--like meditating or playing shortstop.

Several--always the same ones--of these young people have tried my patience for 16 weeks. One young man, who has made no secret of his somewhat violent youth and who now trains as a boxer and a extreme fighter, last night objected to my request that he remove his headphones as he completed the course final. "It's not bothering nobody," he said, even though I told him that because this was a departmental requirement, it was also mine. He stared at me in a way that let me know he wanted to (and most assuredly could) pummel me into submission. I pictured myself rolling on the floor with my lips split open, my teeth shattered. But, like a dog, I stared back just because... why? Who knows. He ended up putting his precious iPod away, finishing the exam, and leaving without measuring his knuckles against the width of my cheekbones.

Others in the class have challenged me in similar ways, speaking aloud against required assignments, at due dates, at work they see as frivolous and meaningless. Two of these darlings come 15 minutes late (together) to most classes, often not bringing their textbooks, usually shaking their respective heads at what they are asked to do.

Many nights I have come home discouraged--with the students, with this avocation, with my sometimes obvious inability to articulate why I ask them to do something. I want to say there is rhyme to my reason, that I am hopeful they will someday need to be able to write and will do so effectively. Each night I must weigh this discouragement against the small sparks of progress I see in some of the students' writing, against those students who seem to take the classwork seriously and who are considerate of others in the classroom.

This semester there is Josh, who has written about his troublesome childhood and stints of homelessness as his mother was drunk. He has also given me some of his creative writing to read, and I have said that I will do so though at times this semester he has tested my patience with his childish remarks and behavior. There is Karen, who left an abusive, alcoholic husband and is now trying to get her daughter into rehab of some sort. There are Tiffany and Janice, who rarely speak but who check and recheck their in-class work and who use every possible minute of allotted time for in-class tests. And there is Will, who is quiet and intelligent and who talks football and soccer and baseball with me, and who is majoring in Liberal Arts with a goal of teaching elementary school. And there are others who have alluded to abuse of one kind or another, to broken families, to dreams they have for their futures.

And there are several who have already registered for the course I will teach next semester, a course I have promised will be more difficult not because of its content requirements, but because I will know what they have studied this semester.

At the start of the next semester, I hope to have forgotten my discouragements, just as I hope to have learned from my own mistakes.