I’d like to issue a general thank you to students. Things are challenging these days, at the level of administration and collegial governance. We’re going through a lot of change very rapidly. I’m taking on some administrative duties, which places me in a new role relative to my teaching. Some days the weight is pretty heavy and I sit in my car getting up the strength to make the walk across the parking lot into the campus.
Today was one of those days when the weight was heavier than usual. I would like to sleep for a month, I think, and not answer any emails for at least a century. One of my colleagues wrote me in an email:
“Find that magic in the classroom. That will lift you up. I know it will.”
I came to the classroom where my students had already reconfigured the tables from their rows into pods, just like I like it. The technology worked. My TA did an interesting and illuminating exercise on personal epistemology and intellectual risk that began with sharing a snack. And then we had a lecture on knowledge, what it is, where you get it, what “counts” and how we know, and the discussion was thoughtful and insightful. In the second class they worked on solving the problems of the world and were by turns serious and hilarious. I was buoyed by the students’ energy, their willingness to listen and to think and to talk. And I left feeling better, lifted up by the reminder that this is why I carry that weight of hard-to-grasp change and difficult-to-manage uncertainty. This is why it’s worth it to struggle along with my colleagues who are also struggling just as hard and with just as much good faith to envision the institution that will help us to fulfill our aspirations as teachers and learners.
Many years ago, when I was teaching a theory course that touched on some very heady issues that revealed the deep connections our studies have to the “outside world,” a student asked me quite sincerely: “How do you get up every day knowing what you know?” I answered without thinking, from the heart, I suppose: “Because you’re here.” In that moment I knew that I had found my place and that this gut response was the truth. I get up every day because the students are here. If they weren’t here I’d have to go find them. I’m quite sure that few of them know how important they are to me and my life. I suppose I should tell them.