Back to School

There is a sacred list of names, deep in the musty desk-drawer of my heart, of those teachers who changed my life. Some did so by pulling back a veil. Others, by helping me course-correct by just a degree or two ... and thus changing the direction of my journey as a student, a writer, a thinker, and a person, in the process.

As I return to teaching this fall, for the first time in a long while, I'm prompted to pause and think on what it means, and has meant, for my life. I'm in a professional transition stage right now, and I don't imagine that I'll be teaching for very long, but I do feel extraordinarily grateful and excited to be back in the college classroom right now, at this moment in my life and in history. Teaching is such challenging, energizing, and always evolving work, and it has made me better at pretty much everything else I do.

Teaching is leading, and it is also following. Teaching is listening. And it is also clarifying and articulating. It is designing, planning, and implementing. It is assessing, measuring, revising, and tinkering. 

And teaching is always responding to what is actually happening in the room, right now, and maybe also outside of it. Some days it is triage. Some days, it's a party. 

I remember a few moments in the classroom where I really didn't know what to do, moments that opened things up for me and my students.

In my first year at the University of Dayton, frustrated that few students seemed to have actually read the Mark Twain piece I'd assigned in Major American Writers, I asked for a show of hands. "Let's just be honest," I said, "How many of you have read the entire assignment, 100%?" A couple of hands raised. "Okay, thanks. Now, how many have read about half? Less than half? None?" When it became clear that only a handful of the 25 or 30 students had read at least half the text, I paused, wondering how we could carry on with a meaningful and equitable discussion. Shoot, I thought, what now? Then I just went for it. "Alright, then. This is a discussion-based class, and I've given you all the background I can on this material. If you haven't read at least most of the text, then you've got nothing to contribute to our work, and nothing to offer your classmates to help their understanding. And the discussion won't be meaningful to you and your learning. So you should just leave. Those who've read can stay and discuss. The rest of you, please leave now. Go, and go read. ... And, yes, this will count as one of your absences for the course."

Students were a little stunned, but eventually they began packing up their books, shooting confused looks at each other, and made their way out of our crowded, windowless classroom in the old Miriam Hall. Things did seem to turn a bit after that. I checked in more regularly by other means, gave guided reading questions and other tools to help students with the reading and to hold them accountable, and participation and discussion improved. 

I was nervous, though, about what my literal dismissal of more than half the class that one day would do on my end-of-term course evaluations. It was my first year on the tenure-track, and I was anxious. I was deeply relieved then, when the evaluations were generally positive. Some complaints about too much reading, harsh grading - the usual - but no reference to that day. Except for a lone comment in the open feedback section at the end of one evaluation. This respondent explained that he'd been a student athlete, a football player, who wasn't all that into academics. Then he got injured, couldn't play, and had just been kind of floating along, becoming further disengaged. That day I'd called students out, held them accountable, had made him take a long hard look at himself. He began to wonder why he was in college at all, if not to play football ... and he began to think about his education, his own active learning, for the first time. Did he care? In fact, he discovered, he did. He said he turned a corner that day, that he'd changed his whole attitude and begun to focus on all his studies in a new way. And he wanted to thank me for pushing him in that direction. I read and re-read the comment a few times. This, I realized, was my real goal: not the reading or the discussion itself, but the claiming of agency and responsibility for one's own and other's learning. 

Not every class has had a moment like that. But there are always moments of crux, worry, and wonder. When a student reveals something deeply sensitive and personal. When a student offers an overtly racist interpretation of a text. When somebody shows up drunk, or distraught, or too sleepy to hold their head up. Or maybe with their kid, or their mother. 

Teaching is holding accountable, and it is also supporting and sometimes offering mercy. It is about building relationships of respect, mutuality, and trust with and among students. Teaching, like learning, can be deeply collaborative. 

And sometimes teaching is about standing up strong, in the face of external forces that would undermine the very heart of education. This feels like a moment in history when too many of our colleagues across the country are facing such opposition.

Teaching is also ultimately a long game: it's an investment in the lives and lifelong development of our students, but it's also one with signs and markers along the way. Done right, it can be transformational for students and teachers, alike.

At Saint Mary's College, where I'm teaching now, we are particularly committed to "meeting students where they are at." So where is that, today? Undergraduate students at my institution, like most others, are increasingly likely to identify as queer, trans, or non-binary. They are more likely to be students of color, and/or (like me!) first-generation-to-college. And they increasingly expect and value diversity, equity, and inclusion in the curriculum and classroom. My students are more likely than in the past to have sought out formal learning accommodations involving extra time, technology, and flexibility. They are also more likely to openly identify as autistic. They have grown up with active shooter drills and are highly tuned into the responses and social cues of others. There are likely multiple students in every class who have survived some form of sexual assault. Increasingly, our students are military veterans. Young adult students today are more likely to experience some form of diagnosed anxiety - and perhaps to despair about our global future. They may be highly politically engaged and are likely monitoring social and political issues via social media. And they are, of course, digital natives, raised on cell phones and Snapchat, and coming into adulthood in the era of open AI. 

Today's college students bring immense strengths, insight, and gifts, as well as challenges and wounds - ones that I need to see and learn from.  

How can I try to meet them? Here are some of the things I'm trying out this fall:

• Engaging AI directly, critically, reflectively, and, I hope, productively in my first year writing class. Our focus is on writing as inquiring humans, in the digital age. We'll be using ChatGPT in limited, self-reflective ways, and figuring things out together!

• Using contract grading. None of the assignments in that writing course will be graded (lots of feedback, but no grades). If students choose to do ALL the stuff on our agreed-upon list, then they are guaranteed a B in the course. If they do some extra, they can earn an A. Contract grading is designed and shown to decrease anxiety, grade obsession, panicked plagiarism, inequity, and more, and to increase risk-taking and steady engagement with the writing process. After about 20 years teaching developing writers, I know that if students just do the work, they will grow as writers. And they'll earn that final grade.

• Tackling trauma. It's always risky to invite students to read and write about books that deal with trauma ... and there is personal and/or intergenerational trauma woven into the spine of every one of the books I'm teaching in my course on US women's memoir this fall. It's a diverse set of narratives from a wide range of traditions and perspectives, but they all speak to the transformational power of literacy, education, and community. Many of our students have experienced trauma in their own lives and will bring unique perspectives to these works ... and maybe find some clues for navigating and telling their own stories in the process. 

I'm not really sure how any of this will go. I never am. But if I'm not out there, risking, trying, learning, and sometimes failing, then I can't ask my students to be, either. And how else will we learn from each other along the way?

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Teaching and learning come in many forms, not always in classrooms. What are you teaching or learning these days? What risks are you taking in the process?