education

Old Dominion University, March 12, 2026

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

This past Monday morning I returned to classes at Old Dominion University for the first time since the day before the shooting which killed ODU professor Lt. Col Brandon Shah. On Thursday, March 12th, a gunman entered Professor Shah’s room in Constant Hall, where he taught ROTC students, and killed him. Classes were cancelled, Spring Break followed, and everyone left campus for ten days or so to process—or not process—what happened.

During break we received a stream of emails from the college president, the dean, the counselors, a colleague who has training and experience in trauma recovery,and more, all updating us on the actions of the college and reminding us of the availability of counselors, some of whom were set up across the street in the Chartway Arena. When I returned on Monday, a colleague sat with a counselor at a table in the lobby of our building and made themselves clearly available to anyone who wished to talk. They handed out blue ribbons of support, and their presence along with similar setups throughout campus reminded everyone that not only did something happen here, but not everyone will handle it the same way.

The very notion of yet another school shooting is actually somewhat abstract when it doesn’t occur in front of you; when the information you receive comes from the same devices which deliver the weather and Fortnight updates. While the incident occurred just a football field away, it is apparently only relative to those who were there when it happened, otherwise it might as well have been across the country.

At a table in the hallway on the floor where my classes meet sat a chaplain who wore a vest stating as much. I introduced myself and asked if anyone had spoken to him, out of curiosity. “They’re still processing” he said, which meant no. But my fears were about to be realized. They’re not processing this at all.

In some of those emails we received, experts, including counselors trained in post-traumatic situations, suggested how to discuss the events with students who might still be in denial, scared, in defense mode, or worse. One of the suggestions was to simply make students aware that it’s okay to talk about it but not necessarily talk about it then. In other words, business as usual but with a sense of awareness to the tragedy which played out just two hundred feet to the north.

I decided to go to my classes, pull my chair into the center of the room, and talk.

For too many years too many times on the news I have heard so many reports of how “counselors will be available” and “assistance will be available throughout the campus” or high school, or elementary school, and now this school, ODU, which is both one of my alma maters as well as my place of employment. Nine years of higher education and thirty-seven years as a college professor, yet this is the first time I experienced the presence of those aids. That’s a good thing, of course. I returned to campus and scattered throughout the buildings and outdoor areas were tables, counselors with identification about their necks indicating who they are, chaplains in yellow “Chaplain” vests. Blue Ribbons, Blue wrist bands. Boxes of Klenex.

I met one of the trauma specialists who introduced himself to me before class, who told me in front of everyone that he will be in the hallway if anyone wanted to talk.

I pulled my chair to the center of the room and I asked how their break had been, who had traveled, who stayed home. No one was going to bring it up, so I did. I said, “Listen, I didn’t know Lt. Colonel Shah. I have taught in Constant Hall several times and I know where the classroom is, but I was home when this happened and this is my first time back. But this hits close to home, doesn’t it? It does for me.”

Silence, of course. Honestly, at nineteen I don’t think I’d have a clue what to say either. So I put it out there. “Does anyone want to say anything about how this effected them?”

Oh my:

One girl was pissed because her math tutor is in that building and she had to miss her session that day and she has a midterm and isn’t doing well.

One guy shrugged and said he heard about it and was sorry for the loss, but it didn’t really affect him at all. “I’m not in ROTC.”

Another: Shit happens.

Laughter.

Complete indifference. It’s a reality show episode. It’s a reel on Instagram. It’s a minute ago so move on already.

During a break I asked the counselor, who could hear the entire exchange, if this was simply denial and some sort of defense mechanism, but he said he didn’t think so. That sure, for some of them, they truly are still in the denial stage and haven’t processed it enough yet to understand the implications of what happened, but for a growing number in his experience, the new norm is indifference. It isn’t a lack of compassion or even empathy; those are situational responses and they’re not necessarily ready to dial them up in a writing class. It is more or less “just something else that happened last week.”

Inside I wondered why everyone wasn’t outraged that one of their professors was gunned down closer to us in that class than their dorm rooms were. It’s not easy being a student today. Aside from the barrage of instructions and technology and demands, they are also part of a generation which grew up with shootings as daily news, guns in backpacks, violence as an alternative behavior, and media from movies to games which inundate us all with killings and destruction as entertainment.

I thought about one of my previous jobs as professor at Saint Leo University on the Little Creek Amphibious Base in Virginia Beach, where nearly all my students in thirty years were retiring or active-duty military who had served in the Gulf War, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, and some in Vietnam. I remembered how some didn’t come home, and some came home unable to function as they had before. I remembered one student who had been in three of my classes who went home from class one night and shot himself. But I always, absolutely always, felt safe in their presence, on that base—one of the most secure in the world. It never crossed my mind that anyone would come into the room and shoot me. But there, they all had stories like that, horrible and unforgettable stories which redefined their life’s narrative and reset the trajectory of their existence. At St Leo’s one time in 2009 or 2010, we talked about an incident in Camp Liberty, Iraq, when a solder went into a training camp during a seminar and killed five soldiers serving with him. In that class, everyone opened up about how they felt; they had been there and knew the value of sharing those emotions. On that night, one solider said, quietly, “I was there. I was at the clinic that day.”

The entire class at St Leo’s talked for an hour about how he processed it. Was still processing it.

Monday, I went back into class and some read their phones, some stared at the counselor, wondering, perhaps, if they should talk to him. I wondered if anyone wondered if they were supposed to feel more disturbed than they do and are worried about that.

I sat down and after some teaching wrapped up class. But before I stood up I said, “Listen. Seriously, everyone, please.” They were uncharacteristically present. “You’ve got three or four other classes still. It’s quite possible that you’re going to be in class next to someone who was in the room that day.” I waited. “It is possible that someone next to you in the next class was in the next room and heard the gunfire, heard the screams and chaos as other students your age subdued and killed the assailant. They may want to talk. They may just say that they were there, or maybe they’ll say more than that. They might want you to listen. So if that happens, listen—take the time to let them talk. Don’t say “I understand.” We don’t. Just say you’re sorry and listen more.

Two students broke down. A few others sat longer than they should, lingering like maybe they did want to say something after all.

Later the counselor told me that since they weren’t there, the indifference was prevalent. But when I suggested some friends of theirs might have been, certainly someone in a class might have been, their empathy rose to the surface and it became, perhaps for the first time, quite real to them indeed.

The world is a war zone, a failed project. These students sitting through their writing course with another four years ahead of them before “life actually starts” as someone once told me, are in it for real, wanting to change things, wanting to be part of something. I was glad to know that when it came to their peers, they were very much negatively affected by the possibility of violence.

Because they don’t know if at some point some other disturbed person will confront someone they know in some class and kill them. They do not know. Two weeks ago it seemed a mostly ridiculous notion.

Now it is part of their narrative. This is not the education they came here for.

Speechless

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

Some years ago while working at a different college, I wrote this essay loosely ripping off an essay by Tim O’Brien. I’m not ashamed. I found it recently and thought about how I still neglect to complete the very assignment I encouraged my students to complete as often as possible. . Something needs to change.

What Have We Learned

Older students are better than those just out of high school. The big dude with the pierced face and tattooed eyelids is probably a great writer. Many students would rather pull a lower grade than have a professor look at a rough draft. Students who take copious notes don’t always fair as well as students who just listen intently. If it happened before they were born, it really doesn’t have any affect on them and therefore they shouldn’t be required to learn about it.

Hamlet is boring; Oedipus is stupid; statistics is tedious; bio lab is too long; developmental classes are a waste of money; introduction to literature is a waste of time; history is not relevant; philosophy has no practical application; psychology is disturbing and the instructors are disturbed; text messages are read more than text books; face to face communication is obsolete; and the only source of information is the internet.

Here’s the great irony of education: While we should become smarter as time goes by because we’ve been given the answers through the centuries, watched the lessons played out on the battlefields and in seminar rooms, we’re actually ignoring more, learning less, and not really keeping tabs of our decline.

Maybe if I text my lectures they’ll pay attention. Phones go off in class, in the hallways, in their backpacks. They reach in to quickly shut it off because they “forgot it was on,” and spilling out onto the floor are the books they need, a few small notebooks, and various articles of clothing. They carry more in their bags then in their minds. 

The science and math books are ten-pounders, and the anthologies aren’t lightweights either. For lab they need their lab equipment, gloves, goggles, special notebooks, dead animals. Rough drafts, final copies, required journals, various books read besides the textbook, art supplies, tape decks, language discs, keys, wallets, games and personal items. Some have staplers, toothbrushes, condoms, aspirin, medicine bottles, and hand soap. Some carry crayons and cookies because their kids come to class sometimes when elementary school is out or cancelled, or when the kid is sick but the Prof told the parent if she missed one more day she’d fail the course. They carry medicine for those kids, bi-polar, attention-deficit, hyperactive. They carry the same for themselves, medicine for their own ADD, ADHD, OCD, diabetes and manic-depression. They carry a lot. They need to remember when papers are due, when tests are scheduled, including their math tests, their physics test, algebra, pregnancy, special needs tests, mammograms, CT scans, and various other tests they’ve got on their mind and written down in their notebooks at the bottom of their parcel.

They carry cell phones with various rings, various friends calling during class, right before class. They have small machines attached to their ear so they can remotely answer the phone without having to move their arms or lift their hands. They have the numbers of everyone they know automatically programmed in. They no longer have to walk to see anyone, walk to find a phone, remember any numbers, lift their arms, or turn their heads.

Once someone’s phone vibrated during class. The vibration on the desk was as loud as a ring, but she politely excused herself. Some professors insist the phones be off during class, and they won’t even allow them to be turned to vibrate. But this student came back in and said she was sorry and that she had to go, that was her babysitter calling and someone from her husband’s command post was at her house waiting for her to come home. A week later I discovered her husband had been blown up at a roadside bombing on the airport road from Baghdad. Another student’s brother was on television. He worked for Blackwater in Baghdad and she watched her brother’s charred body swing from a bridge in Iraq.

One student shot himself in the head because he thought the paper was due and he thought his medicine wasn’t. True story. A colleague of mine listened quietly one day to a near-suicidal student explain why her paper was late and how her daughter was going through depression and they were bringing her to the doctor to see what was wrong, and it weighed so heavily on her mind that she couldn’t really concentrate on the paper and would the professor mind the paper turned in a few days late, and she agreed. Students knew this about her—she would work with anyone. A few days later my colleague hung herself in her kitchen because her medicine was fucked up.

This is the American Community College. These are the trenches, in the city; some of these students come to get ahead, knock off some basic education classes before transferring and paying more at the university. But some come here instead of jail, or to bide their time, or to hang with old friends and maybe hook up with new ones. Some come to keep off the streets; it can get dangerous these days. But some of these students come from real war-torn areas. My student Deng walked across Somalia to Ethiopia twice looking for safety. Before he found it at ten-years-old in a Red Cross camp, he was given an automatic rifle and taught to kill. Now he tries to write about gun control and crime in seven hundred words, making sure the grammar is right. His mother was raped and hacked to death in front of his eyes. His father “disappeared.” He was a Lost Boy. Sometimes he didn’t concentrate. Yeah, okay, sometimes he didn’t pay attention. But when he came to my office we talked about politics and survival. We talked about Africa and faith. We talked about ideas, and he told me Chinua Achebe knows Africa. He told me how Sartre would not be popular in Somalia but Descartes would. He knew the differences, understood the gentle nuances that separate philosophy and politics. I didn’t ask about his scars. He didn’t ask about mine. Deng came here with an education the likes of which we can’t possibly conceive. He told me he as soon as he found the camp he knew he needed to leave. I said I understood. He said it was too much, and he wanted to die so badly and that’s when he knew he just had to get out. I didn’t answer. I had nothing left to say to him.

What I know now is this: all the lectures in all the classrooms from all the professors in the world will not prepare us to be anything of value if we don’t find any value in what we do and how we live our lives.

Of course we would all do things differently; even just a few small moments. I’d never have left Massachusetts. I’d have gone to Monterrey anyway. I would have passed on the Trout in Prague, the oysters in Asheville. When I left Tucson that last time I’d have headed west instead of back east.

We are always in pursuit of ourselves, aren’t we? Even if we don’t consciously consider such notions day to day. In class one morning I asked my students if there was anything they would have done differently in their short but tech-dominated past. They all laughed and had answers that ranged from staying off-line to trying harder in high school to treating a loved one better while she had the chance. They talked for a bit; they got quiet. They thought a while. And I added this: What are you doing now that five years from now you will wish you had done differently?

They looked at me for a moment with just a little confusion and some wonder about their future, and they waited for me to talk.

But honestly, I have nothing left to say.

Learn. Everything. All of it.

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

At the risk of being logical and empathetic, I offer my plan for the best teaching and parenting. I call it The Bob Plan.

Dear Everyone:

Learn everything. All of it. Memorize the multiplication and periodic tables, memorize the dictionary, the standard one, of course, but also the Slang Dictionary, and the Urban one, the Rural, the Southern, and the New England Elitist one. Know how to talk to everyone; know what everyone is saying. In that vein learn French and Spanish. Find yourself fluent in Arabic and Mandarin, Farsi and all other ways in which others speak. Know sign language. Study the click languages.

Read the history of the world by writers in the United States, China, Russia, Ethiopia, and the Vatican. Know the sacred texts as well as you know your phone texts. Read the Torah in Hebrew and the Bible in Greek. Know the differences between the New Standard Bible and the King James Version and talk about it with friends after reciting the Koran. Know the Pali Cannon.

Why would any teacher, parent, civic leader, country leader, anyone not want their own people to know more than others? Why would anyone want to send their children/students/citizens into battle without at least as much knowledge as those they might face? It is a supreme derelict of duties to march our young into the world half-dressed, but there are some who believe to send those same humans into school, the workplace, the world arena, with only a portion of the material everyone else might have, makes sense. But it is not only neglect, it is criminal. If our students, children, citizens, can have the answers to life’s questions which might be put to them at the most inopportune time, what sane-thinking person would deny them that information?

Know the laws, all of them—the local dictates and the constitutional arguments. Say whatever you want to say about the ideas of those you disagree with and know the amendment which allows you to do so without interference. Know the statutes and precedents, know the case names and dates and understand their practical application.

Understand every sexual preference, position, and disease. Be able to converse with the unlicensed prostitute and the Surgeon General at the same table with equal respect and knowledge. Understand the schedules to the subway system and the history behind the Great Migration in the 1930’s. Be able to discuss the effects of slavery on the industrial stagnancy of the sub-Sahel as well as the disenfranchisement of your neighbors two streets away. Be able to predict the weather and prevent heart attacks. Know CPR and how to use a defibrillator.

What would happen if everyone in a society turned out to be the smartest person in the room?

How could that hurt anything or anyone?

Arguments would be tight and based upon verifiable evidence gathered cautiously and patiently. Accuracy would be a given, sources would be well vetted, and mutual respect would engulf the debate.

Know the value of diplomacy and the value of gardening. Understand short- and long-term investments, the advantages and dangers of credit, and the National Highway numbering system. Know how to use a slide rule and AI. Know how to spot any constellation at a glance and the species of every bird just by hearing its call.

Who would have a problem with all of this knowledge except someone who, by keeping the public ignorant, can take advantage of them? There is no other value of ignorance. None.

Learn to make an omelet and a whiskey sour. Learn to pick up after yourself and how to greet a stranger. Learn to say “thank you” and “you’re welcome.”

Know seventh grade Social Studies as well as eleventh grade English. Memorize the twenty-seven amendments to the constitution and read Dickens, Dickenson, and Stephen King. Read Flaubert in French and Dostoevsky in Russian. Kafka in German. Watch Citizen Kane and Fifty Shades of Grey. Read and watch and listen to it all. All of it. The entire everything.

Learn how to learn; observe, ingest, swallow. Learn diplomacy and humor, learn nuance and grandeur. Recognize hyperbole and subtle inflections. All of it. Understand how to fix a car, build a rabbit pen, and stack wood. Learn the proper methods to painting a room and the best way to get red wine stains out of a white carpet.

Why would anyone want their citizens to be less knowledgeable than others? It makes no sense. Study with the people of your community and those from small villages in other hemispheres. Find out what they know, share what you’ve got. Remember their names and learn their customs. Knowledge guarantees inclusion and diversity. Those who learn not only have the answers, they know how to find new answers, decipher fact from falsehood.

Be smarter than AI, more efficient than algorithms, more fluent than the translators. Be a step ahead.

No one should want someone they care about or are responsible for to be less prepared than anyone else.

Choose your own path based upon ambition instead of statistics, your own pronoun based upon preference not ordinance, your own partner based upon love not gender. Understand why that makes sense. Learn how to show others that makes sense.

Find out why we’re still talking about Mozart three hundred years later. Find out what happened at the Second Continental Congress, what did Henry Highland Garnett and WEB Dubois know? Read the slave narratives, read all of Shakespeare. Learn how to gamble; learn how to smuggle. Try the haggis. Taste the raw fish. Find out.

Everything. Learn absolutely everything. It is the only course of action you should want so you can navigate this world on your own terms with all the information necessary; and it should be the only logical ambition all true leaders should desire for their citizens.

Best. Professor. Ever.

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

To start, one of my students wrote this sentence: “The iridescent luminescence of the phosphorescent fungi, a phenomenon both ephemeral and mesmerizing, cast an ethereal glow upon the cavern’s labyrinthine corridors.”

I am a bloody brilliant professor. It took me more than thirty-five years to reach this level of excellence as a teacher, but at last I have proof of my abilities to teach college freshman to produce excellent work. Allow me to set aside any semblance of humility for this moment to suggest some rewards should be forthcoming. Teacher of the year, perhaps; a newly-imagined accommodation introduced this year for the purpose of honoring me, maybe. If there is still a Department of Education, maybe a plaque on a wall. 

For the first time in my career, more than fifty students (out of sixty five) wrote nearly perfect papers. Every sentence structured with absolute perfection, diction equivalent to PhD candidates of some Ivy League institution after the work has been combed by editors with a thesaurus, and not a single comma out of place, even the Oxford commas; every single one of them exactly where they should be. 

There’s more. Oh, and wait for the Big Reveal.

The expert sources, despite their association nearly exclusively with universities in Southeast Asia and India, all precisely attributed. What is especially satisfying is that I managed to enable my students, on only their second paper ever in a collegiate class, to write better than any student I have had since the end of the Reagan administration. These magnificent students used compound sentences with five-syllable words with such accuracy and topic-specific precision I have a renewed faith in this country’s education system. Bravo! primary, middle, and high school teachers! You have passed to us college instructors the finest composition writers in a generation.  

But here’s the real reason to celebrate: These students are all high school students taking my college writing class in a Dual Enrollment Program. Again, Bravo! And, well, just Wow! And imagine, they’re almost all just seventeen-years-old.

Okay, so this can’t be a unique situation, one might think, and therefore not worthy of the accolades I suggest. So here’s more: This all happened in the past few weeks in West Virginia where 27% of high school students failed to meet the reading proficiency. And according to an extensive study by the University of Wisconsin of English Learners in Middle Schools and High Schools Pre, During, and Post Covid, English scores declined steadily and significantly just about the time my current students were in ninth grade. The most dramatic decline was in writing skills, followed closely by listening skills. And yet, I pulled their previously unrecognized talents out of the hidden depths of their inattentive minds and produced extraordinary students writing exquisitely ideal papers. 

I’m that good. 

Some suggest I investigate the possibility the papers were ChatGPT generated, but I say there’s no need. I understand their defense of AI with the car-replaces-the-horse analogy, and that the need to know how to write the essay is secondary to their ability to know how to find one that meets the requirements when they need to do so. The previous example in education might be the Texas Instruments primitive calculator replacing the slide rule. I do understand. But these seventeen-year-old Best-Essay-Writers EVER students would not use such devices since I specifically and clearly instructed them that to do so would result in failing the course and possible expulsion from the university for Academic Dishonesty; why would anyone smart enough to write such pristine essays at the same time be dumb enough to risk their entire college career and subsequently their livelihoods by cheating on a college essay by plagiarizing, even if from a computer? Nay! This work must be original! 

Honestly, I had doubts at one time that I ever should have been teaching college. I wanted to raise goats. But I’m convinced now that this path I stumbled onto was the right one. I have written my own essays for more than forty years, shared them with best-selling authors and acclaimed writing faculty at the finest colleges for suggestions and assistance, and have an extensive publishing record–pardon my lack of humility here. I just write this to highlight the fact that I find myself surrounded by minors–for only a couple of these students are yet eighteen-years-old–who have clearly surpassed anything I have been capable of, editing and sentence structure wise, I mean. Nothing can be done about how dreadfully boring their essays are. But I do not grade college compositions based upon their level of “excitement.” No, these 900 and 1200 word essays, all in perfect APA format, stand alone as unblemished. 

I’ll be straight–I was a bit worried at the beginning of the semester when I posted on the online discussion board for each of them to explain their interests, hobbies, and hopes for their future, and the responses were riddled with incomprehensible fragments and more dangling modifiers than I’ve ever seen dangled before. But my worries where unfounded. After just five weeks I have successfully produced a stellar group of writers, all in a school district ranked 41st out of 55 in the state. All in a state ranked last–50th–in overall education.

At the very least I deserve a raise. 

Life in the Margins (Part two of two)

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When I was in my late teens my father and I played golf one afternoon at his club in Virginia Beach. About the third hole a man caught up to us and played along. He was good; a driver, short chip, one putt player. I was not. I had the same clubs but more often than not sliced it to the right or bounced it into a water hazard. I didn’t have a temper, but it wasn’t unusual for me to put my club back in my bag with some force, as if to say, “Don’t even think about coming back out until you know how to hit the ball straight!”

I did this after I butchered an easy fifty-yard chip shot by clipping it straight to the right into a lake. I cursed, of course. The golfer was standing nearby waiting to hit his second shot to my fourth.

“Can I give you some advice?” he asked. I sighed. First of all, no, no you cannot, because I’m nineteen and I don’t take advice, and because I don’t even know you. But noting my dad just a few yards away I opted for sportsmanship.

“Sure,” I sighed.

He paused. “You’re not good enough to get mad.”

I stared at him.

He continued: “Really, how often do you play? Do you take lessons? Do you have the best clubs? If you played all the time and took lessons, well then you could be upset at not improving. Otherwise you’re just wasting good energy.”

Ever since then, I have not only relaxed and enjoyed the game, I play better. After a while I applied this to most aspects of life, not in a way to find an excuse to not try, but to relieve the stress that comes from going through life doing things everyone else seems to simply be better at than me. It also motivated me to get into the game a bit in those areas I do have some game.

Awkward Transition Section:

I gave an assignment not long after September 11th, 2001, when my students would have been in their teens during the attack. I wanted them to reflect on what will remain one of the most significant days in our lives. How, I wondered, do they remember that day? I thought it was a good assignment—a specific event but a vague enough request for them to wander where they wished.

One student wrote of her aunt who never made it out of the South Tower. Another wrote about her sense of horror and disbelief, which, she wrote, she could never correctly capture on paper. Several actually commented they didn’t think it affected their lives at all while others spit out what they kind of paid attention to with one ear from local television reports—about heightened security, conspiracy factors, the indescribable loss of life that spontaneously erupted on TV that morning. But one student’s piece caught my attention. He wrote, in part:

“In a way, September 11 demonstrated, more than any one phrase can contain, the strength of our Constitution. The day became the beginning of a new era of the democratic process, and the definition of how we will defend our liberty, maintain our principles and remember our purpose—to stand as an example of humanity’s potential. It was Memorial Day. It was Victory Day.“

I read this with amazement. I asked for the rough draft and received exactly what I knew I would: A similar, hand written version with some words written differently and others crossed out. Excellent.

“You plagiarized this,” I said, which, understand, is rare for teachers to say. We receive copied material all the time, but nearly never have enough proof to say, directly, “You didn’t write this.” In a world of AI generated essays, it gets even tougher, but I ask them to ask themselves if they’re good enough to plagiarize correctly. I remind them in order to pull off an AI paper or plagiarized work they need to have a deep understanding of my requirements for the essay, the style I’m looking for, the specific language, the relevant references, and to be frank, I let them know, most of them aren’t good enough writers to plagiarize that well.

But this kid nailed it. “I didn’t plagiarize that!”

I smiled. “Yeah, you did.” My small laugh, I think, pissed him off. He continued to challenge me. Normally, plagiarized papers frustrate faculty members when they know an assignment was plagiarized—either from another student or from one of the many web sites offering papers for sale, or more recently for various AI sites— but can’t prove it. So when proof does come along, while it’s disappointing to have such lazy ass students,  it’s not just slightly satisfying to stop them in their tracks.

“Yes, you did. Tell me why you shouldn’t fail.”

“Because I didn’t plagiarize it.”

“Okay, I’ll tell you what. I want you to bring me a copy of the original. If you do, I’ll let you redo the assignment without penalty.” I figured the embarrassment would be sufficient.

Once a student turned in a paragraph she plagiarized from our own text. Another time a student turned in a paper right out of the psychology textbook assuming I wouldn’t recognize that his in-class writing had the ability of a seventh grader and the essay he turned in was written by Freud.

I don’t think they’re simply overworked. They’re bored. What they’re doing is staring at me and thinking of everything else. In the front row is the guy with his fingers in his mouth, gnawing on his fingernails, pulling them out wet every once in a while to observe his work and then shift his focus to a different cuticle. In the back row some dude’s pretending to write notes while he’s reading his text messages on his cell phone.

Certainly, some things really are boring, and sometimes it’s difficult to find the relevance. I know; I was a student.

Too many aren’t listening. And I totally understand. There’s too much noise. Streaming services, reels, TikTok, internet scrolls, deadlines, term papers, credit card bills, car repairs, moving in, moving out, daycare, spouse abuse, deployment, speeding tickets. The pace of life is at Mach 7, and we’re teaching from a stage coach—no wonder they’re bored. They haven’t yet realized that life is infinitely more interesting from the stage coach; that life exists in the margins as well as the headlines, and we should not simply focus on the large, obvious lessons we underline but the small details where we learn what we are and are not good enough at to get upset to begin with.

We’re too busy for that. Before they’re out the classroom door, students are calling each other, talking and walking from building to cars, elbows bent, phone tucked tight to their ears. We’re completely plugged in. There’s no time to think. Don’t stop, don’t listen, and don’t figure it out. Just keep yourself plugged in to create the illusion that something’s getting done.

And we keep missing the good stuff because we don’t have time. A college where I used to teach had a reading by one of America’s leading poets, Reetika Vazirani. Maybe a dozen people showed up. There was enough room for her cute two-year-old to run around the auditorium, climb across chairs and make everyone laugh. Reetika’s poetry was magic. Students who did show up sat looking at their laps while Reetika read:  

Little by little, I’ll figure it out

I’ll say to them, Relax, we’ll live to be a hundred

I’ll sort things out.

And her child danced down steps toward the small crowd. They missed that for the noise. Noise, that unlike the rest of our lives, won’t ever fade but instead will grow in intensity until it blends to the point of saturation, and becomes inaudible, an undercurrent of indiscernible distraction.

I can’t help but sympathize with students. They see the careers of their parents or friends, and they know at best the future holds the slow erosion of enthusiasm.

Early before class one day, I waited for my student with the plagiarized 9/11 paper to show up. Some papers are so moronic I pray they were plagiarized just so I don’t have to believe one of my students wrote that crap. I read a paper once which began, “Shakespeare wrote Hamlet almost a decade ago.”  Another paper I received once had the same page printed three times. When I pointed out the mistake, he said he couldn’t think of anything else to write but knew the paper had to be 800 words, so he just copied it a few times.

When the student with the plagiarized paper returned, I was ready. “Ah, did you find it?” I asked when he came in and tried to sit down without looking at me.

“No,” he said, as I knew he would. Pride sucks.

“It’s okay. I brought a copy. Shall I read it to you?”

“No.”

“Great! Here goes:”

I believe our best education has nothing at all to do with the classroom or the assignments or the degree. It’s between the lines and off to the side of the narrative where we discover the best of what we need. This isn’t original; in fact, it’s a thought and practice older than formal education.  I don’t remember much from grammar school, which they called it then because they still taught grammar there. But I do remember my teacher taking us all out one April afternoon to lie in the grass on our backs and stare at the sky while she told us about the tragedy aboard Apollo 13 going on right then in space above us. All the discussions about what went wrong and how they might not make it back were irrelevant until we rested in the grass and stared at the sky.

The thing is, we’re all the same. Conditioning has them believing that life is supposed to be some Reality Television show. There’s no plot, no writers, no purpose.  Suicide is the second leading cause of death among college students behind accidents. In fact the rate is higher among college students than it is for the same age group who aren’t enrolled in college—you know why? Because life is infinitely more interesting than most of the crap we’re fed in school. No one cares about most of the material we spend so much time preparing.  In the real world, however, we tend to seek out challenges we know we are up to, where in college students face new levels of expectations, and when they’re not up to the task they complain instead of asking themselves if they’re good enough to be there to begin with, if they’re willing to get better. They’re trying to make sense of it all—or want someone to help them, and when they can’t they rely upon what others have done and plagiarize that.  No wonder they’re bored. Hell, I’m bored.

Sometimes I try and picture my students as toddlers and help them not in a childish way but in a way which I hoped faculty had helped my son, as if he were their own. Was he paying attention when teachers taught?

Was I?

Recently I remembered Reetika’s son, who ran through the vacant auditorium while his mother read poetry. Shortly after that reading, just before taking her own life, Reetika—riddled with psychological challenges—killed her son. I’m tuning that one out. There’s no lesson there. Sometimes I picture my son at twenty, wondering which of my students he would have been like and how would I have answered his questions, approached his plagiarized paper.

I stared at the young man that plagiarized the 9/11 story and asked if he were ready. He turned his head to one side, trying not to make eye contact. “Hey, it’s from the local paper! Well, let’s see:

“There are still no words for September 11’ by…”  I stared at him: “Oh my god, Dude, should I go on?” He laughed a little at my sarcasm because he knew what came next and because, really, it’s so laughable.

“There are still no words for September 11’ by…” I stopped and looked at him. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said.

He spoke quietly: “I didn’t know you wrote it.”

“Where’d you get this?” I asked. A friend of his gave it to him from his developmental English class but had taken my name off his copy.

“I was set up,” he said.

“You think? Do it over. Here. Now. You’ve got the whole class.”

I opened the door and the class came in. I talked about something, I forget what since I wasn’t really listening, and after class everyone left and he gave me his paper. He wrote:

September 11th scared the hell out of me. I was only fifteen and our country was being attacked. I remember rumors that a bomb had been planted at the State Department and I really thought it was just starting, that we were at war right here in America. My brother was nineteen at the time and in the Army in North Carolina, and I couldn’t sleep. Our teacher talked to us about it during the following period at school, but I wasn’t listening. I was thinking of my brother and about war. I was thinking about how a few hours earlier my friends and I were talking about how some guy bought us beer that weekend and we hung out in Croatan, and suddenly none of us was talking at all, and no one wanted to. We just stood around and said, “Damn,” and we were scared.

He found his voice. “I’m disappointed,” I said. “This is way better writing than the one I wrote that you tried to plagiarize.”

“See you Thursday.”

Most students don’t find their own voice or would even hear it over all the noise. When things finally do settle down and it gets quiet and the cell phones are turned off, most of us wouldn’t know our own voice. Maybe we’re scared. I know I am. Maybe we don’t want to know what we sound like, preferring instead to fall into some mainstream composite of expectation and predictability. I tried to tell my son to figure things out for himself. Don’t rely upon being taught, but instead, learn. They’re not the same thing. I hope he listened.

And I’m certain he hoped I listened as well. I tried to pay attention, but it was hard back then with the constant noise of students and papers and classes and all the other voices in my head. So sometimes, too often I suppose, it was difficult to always pay attention and listen to everything. And that scares me.

Turns out it is the small stuff that mattered. It’s the details I should have paid attention to. In class I wonder if I have any right to get angry when they’re cheating with AI; I mean, maybe if I were a better professor they wouldn’t do it. But it’s more than that: In the hallways, in conversations, in all lessons I want to drill into them that the larger objective is not difficult to digest; it is the details that we need to spend more time focusing on. It’s the same for college students as it was for toddlers. You see, I had this fear when my son was little that I would get mad at him one day and he would turn to me and say, “Dad, you’re not a good enough father to get mad. Maybe if you’d practiced a little more.”

The $5,000 Question (part one of two)

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

The following piece originally appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2009, and has since found its way into other journals and texts.

PART ONE:

Wherein our protagonist discovers the first of two important life lessons

Almost every day I hear my fellow professors complain about their students’ poor writing on papers and tests. The papers lack depth, my colleagues say, and reflect a lack of commitment to good writing. Having read countless examples of such sloppy college writing over the past three and a half decades myself, I’ve identified the main cause. Weak writing has little to do with students’ innate writing ability, even less with how much time they spend working on their papers, and less yet with how ill-prepared they are to do college-level work.

The real problem is this: Students know that professors must read their papers, no matter how poorly they might be written, how irrelevant their cited examples, or how “un-collegiate” their content. Poor writing persists because students know that professors are obligated to suffer through endless garbage in hopes of finding something salvageable. They are well aware that many professors will highlight their papers’ weaknesses and then allow rewrites, and that some professors will accept nonwritten extra-credit projects to improve their final grades. In short, students know there are usually ways to avoid putting forth a gallant effort.

I realized this great truth some years ago at the beginning of a semester in a composition class after I finished reading a paper by one of my students. During our next class, I asked everyone, “If I were to skim only the introductions of all twenty of your papers, but read in their entirety only the five papers with the best introductory paragraphs —the ones that entice me to continue reading —and automatically give the rest failing grades, would your introductions improve?”

They all said yes and admitted that they would put more of an effort into capturing my attention and solidifying their theses. I’ve continued to ask each new class of students the same question, and I invariably get the same response.

So a few semesters later, I added to my proposition a more tangible, albeit hypothetical, reward. I asked, “What if I had a check on my desk for $5,000? And what if I rewarded the writer whose introduction most caught my attention, who most effectively made me want to continue because of a solid and clear thesis, with a check for five grand? Would your introductions improve even more?”

Cries of “Absolutely!” filled the room. I stood and stared at them for a solid, uncomfortable minute, nodded, and said, “There it is.” They looked confused, so I added, “You always could do it. You just couldn’t be bothered. You just admitted that to me.”

Silence followed.

I still do this, pointing out to class after class, “You know you write better than these half-baked attempts you typed up late at night. There just wasn’t anything tangible in it for you.” The students will agree. Some will even acknowledge that conditioning throughout high school left them believing that a “good” attempt is good enough.

Now, I’m confident that my students aren’t sitting at home saying, “I’m going to make this as pathetic as possible.” There is no malice on their part. But there’s little “real world” risk involved, either. “What’s an A on a college paper worth in the grand scheme anyway?” they reason.

While the answers are obvious to those of us who do the grading, to the average student with 12 credit hours, a full-time job, a family, and essays to write, excellent work is often simply getting it done at all. Professors are in competition for attention not only with family, friends, classes, and jobs, but also with ever-increasing news-media onslaughts that rarely require students to focus for more than 20 seconds at a time. Our competition is TikTok and Reels on social media.

We must reshape students’ thinking so they understand that “good enough” isn’t, and that doing better is simply a matter of seeking the rewards of excellent writing in the same way one might seek a bigger paycheck for working overtime. We aren’t offering them real training in earning rewards if we allow them to pass their courses despite weak effort and poor results. In the real world, people often get only one opportunity, one job opening, one chance to move ahead. Most of us know that the amount of time that a person commits to a project usually leads to better outcomes, but many students work under the delusion that almost any result is acceptable.

But what if we teach students to write their essays as though professors simply won’t read them if they are of unacceptable quality? What if we all asked ourselves if we would be doing better if the reward for our actions was more enticing? Shouldn’t we be operating at that level anyway?

By driving students to improve their efforts, we can teach them how to maximize their ability and overcome their lack of motivation. We must repeatedly remind them that doing poorly in college through halfhearted effort and mediocre work could lead to doing poorly in the real world, too, damaging their reputations and chances to advance in their careers. We want our students to view us as gatekeepers to what comes next in life instead of as mere grade distributors. Combined, those strategies are often sufficient wake-up calls for students to improve their efforts.

We need to show students that we expect the same effort to get an A that they put forth to get a job, establish a career, or win a trophy. They can do it; they just need to be reminded of the difference between short- and long-term rewards, between internal and external motivation.

And so do I. Sitting in classes now I think about all the times I did “good enough” work—to this day—when had there been more of a tangible reward I’d have made more of an effort, until I trained myself to understand that the effort is the reward.

Anything less than a fully-committed effort should mean an F —failure in college, fired in the real world.

Next time: Our protagonist learns the lesson of his life on a golf course

Copy That

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

This week the assignment in college comp is to write an essay about the positive and negative effects (or short term/long term; physical/emotional, whatever) of involvement in extracurricular activities. Research and valid support from experts are required. Today I read some rough drafts.

Out of twenty something papers, fourteen of them quoted as their source the same “study” done by two professors at the University of Pakistan. Their papers “reflect” the findings in a predictably vague and non-committal way, with language intended for fifth graders and excessive repetition for extreme ADHD readers. My students have not yet figured out that AI writing generally sucks anyway.

After some frustration, I took a moment to Google “Studies of the effects of extracurricular activities,” and the first six or so hits were UCLA, University of Wisconsin, Oklahoma State, Notre Dame, US Department of Education.

National Institute of Health, Texas A&M, Nature. The list of accepted expert sources is extensive.

So what gives?

Ah! I thought. I know exactly what gives.

I Googled “information about the effects of extracurricular activities,” and the first five hits? University of Pakistan. I googled “statistics and quotes about extracurricular activities” and the same Pakistani people popped up. Then I Googled “Essays about the effects of extracurricular activities” and the same people showed up. Go figure.

Quick recount: Test scores started to drop at high schools and universities about the time technology slipped into the curriculum, not unlike obesity showing up more often after the explosion of fast-food restaurants nationwide, or the numbers of hyperactive and anxiety-prone students skyrocketing with the introduction of specialty coffee shops and power drinks. After Texas instruments introduced the calculator to the classroom, the slide rule (kids, look it up) slid out of use. The conversation in the seventies was that students weren’t learning math, they were learning how to use a calculator.

This has been going on since some Bronze Age dad figured out a flint stone started fire faster than rubbing together two sticks. At the time, if he handed his preteen two sticks, the kid might have stared at them like they were relics from the Neanderthal Age.

In all math classes and for all homework, teachers used to exclaim, “Do your own work.” Not meaning don’t cheat, though I suppose that too, but meaning do NOT use electronics such as a Texas Instrument calculator to figure out the solution.

Writing terrifies students because they simply don’t do it. And if they can use AI programs to complete their work AND know the material, well, whatever. But writing is different; it is organic, but most importantly it has been proven to be the most effective tool in learning. It directly aids in retention, and we can actually teach ourselves material and figure out solutions to problems simply by writing about them, page after page. It is called Writing to Learn, and in Days of Yore, it was standard practice, wherein an eighth-grade class might be assigned Hamlet to read, and then their homework was to write two-thousand words about “Hamlet’s madness” or “Laertes revenge,” and so on. The process of writing exposed the characters to the writer with far more accuracy than “thinking” about it, or even talking about it, and the students became better writers, learned to do their own work, and gained valuable confidence in the process. That’s the key issue here—the absolute lack of confidence on the part of the student to write coherently.

But that individual, organically generated (OG?) writing ebbed during a time when individual assignments were sacrificed for “Group Work.”


But I digress. I got carried away as is apt to happen when writing. I do it a lot, though, so I don’t mind. But my students do not do it and they apparently do mind, even in a class they know was a writing class. They avoid it anyway and would rather spend time finding other people who already wrote what I’m looking for. The problem is this isn’t a history class where all I really want to know is if they understand the pressure felt by a group of soldiers on D-Day, which still should be met with original writing of course. No, this IS a writing class, where the lesson we learn is how to actually do it and the subject matter is secondary. We don’t learn how to steal it or copy it or get through by being so howl-at-the-moon lazy that I question how they got through high school to begin with.

(breathe in, breathe out)

Don’t be so quick to assume the student with the 4.0 GPA earned it. Don’t assume the new hire knows the material; they might have just learned how to present information as if they know what they’re doing. Do not automatically believe the students would make good graduate students because they seemed to excel during their undergraduate studies. They may have actually excelled at finding material, not figuring it out on their own.

So how can we tell if students are doing their own work?

Here’s what I do:

I get to know them. I pull a chair into the middle of the room, and we talk about their hobbies, their siblings, their experiences being away at college for the first time, and what they do for fun to relieve the stress of classes. I adopted Leo Buscaglia’s requirement of a “Voluntary-Mandatory” meeting at least once a semester, where every student was required to volunteer to go to his office at least once for five minutes, introduce themselves, and talk about what they want out of the class. So I do that, and I have thoroughly enjoyed getting to know my students better now than I did in the thirty years I was at a different college.

Does it work?

NO! Half my class thinks Hamza Abbasi of the University of Pakistan is the source for all things extracurricular in the American schools. And they all told me so using exactly the same words as each other.

Tomorrow I’m handing out slide rules and asking them for the square root of 3987.5. That will give me time to read more rough drafts.

The Words of the Profits

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Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters said during a board meeting that, “Every district and every classroom will have a Bible in the class and they will teach from that Bible.” Essential to his motivation is what Supt. Walters said next: “It is an historical document that needs to be taught.”

Mr. Walters is right. Everyone should read the Bible, be taught its significance in the history of humanity, the peace it provides to the multitudes, the carnage it caused on so many. Truly, it is impossible to teach about US or world history without understanding the Bible; its influence on why the early immigrants came here should be understood from the primary source, not some secondary hearsay such as biased preachers or well-meaning but uninformed, untrained Sunday School instructors. The Bible’s despicable use as a tool by slaveowners and overseers to perpetuate slavery is a solid example of how having a complete understanding of the Bible can only help students understand this country’s origins and shortcomings. If schools insist on an all-inclusive curriculum including the horrors of that history as well as the belief systems, all source materials should be read and understood, so long as those materials are not, shall we say, taught as gospel. Of course the Bible is a document of ministry and the peace that some can find in worship, but it was also a tool of dehumanization, and students should have the opportunity to know that. All of it. Yes, Mr. Walters, I agree; let’s educate these people.

But to defend your line of reasoning for its use in the curriculum, classes in World History, Sociology, Political Science, and the Humanities cannot be taught fairly unless students read the Koran and the Torah as well, and other often ignored texts detrimental to understanding who we are and how we got here. Just those three texts alone are not only part of the foundation in understanding what motivated civilizations to migrate, fight, create borders, attack enemies, defend sacred grounds, and more, they are at the root of current conflicts throughout the Middle East.

“There is absolutely no disadvantage to having more information”

Oh, and to exclude the writings of dissidents such as Martin Luther and John Calvin, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, would be to pretend most of European history from the early 16th century on did not occur, so make sure the acquisitions department gets ahold of these texts as well; clearly our kids need to know all the information, not just what we find convenient for our beliefs, because I promise you, others have read all those texts and are therefore better equipped. The words of Calvin and Luther, Mohammed and Buddha, redefined thinking throughout the world, challenged borders, crushed political systems, and instigated revolutions–everyone needs to know this in order to move forward. And Marx with Engels created ideas which remain at the heart of every conflict and negotiation with the Soviet Union, and then Russia, China, Cuba, and North Korea. To not have students read the Communist Manifesto is to allow those we disagree with most and those with whom we will have the highest level of aggression to have the intellectual advantage, because I promise they’ve read our constitution and declaration. The Russians have studied American culture–I know, I taught it to them. So on top of the Bible, stack the Koran, the Torah, the Manifesto….oh, there’s more.  

There is absolutely no disadvantage to having more information. I want our grandchildren to have read all of these texts: the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, the writing on the subway walls, the graffiti in Basque country, the samizdat documents distributed among rebellious youth in a failing Banana Republic; the Karma Sutra, the banned books in Florida, the crappy texts that become soft-porn films, those ever-popular wizard stories, and the Swifties comments on TikTok. I want them to understand the religious ramifications, the political dissidence, the social movements, and today’s fleeting fads. All of it. However, we should certainly worry who is disseminating that information. You want to start with the Bible, that’s fine. But to stop there–and please pardon this trite truism–is to send them with a knife into a gun fight. They need all of it, Mr. Walters.

Here’s a simple question: If your children are going to grow up and likely work with, negotiate with, or fight against people of different faiths as well as varying political and social mores, do you want them to have more information than their counterparts, or less?

3.5 Decades

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

I completed my thirty-fifth year of teaching college this week, reaching into five decades, and I’ve collected some observations through six presidential administrations, hundreds of school shootings, several wars, and three blood pressure medications.

When I began, students did not have cell phones, laptops, pcs, Starbucks, energy drinks, vapes, internet or any of its time-sucking programs like Spotify, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and so on—there was no device with which to communicate with others other than the house phone or pay phone. We didn’t have GPS or Uber, relying upon paper maps and taxis, or hitchhiking. We learned through experience instead of Google; research was completed at the card catalogue and microfiche section of the library. Students were less distracted and profoundly less hyper.

At the beginning of it all, it took the first five minutes of class to get students to stop talking; friendships and even marriages were conceived in classrooms where everyone moved swiftly away from high school friends and old neighborhood habits into new relationships which would last a lifetime. They looked at each other, talked and laughed and worried with each other. They took notes in notebooks, asked questions, and they learned how to figure things out instead of find things out. I kept attendance in an attendance book, and everyone knew everyone else’s names. The need to reestablish oneself at eighteen without a net (and without the Net), forced first-timers away from home to grow up faster, mature without the crutch of pre-teen friends a tweet away.

The campus grassy areas, the student center, the dorm lounges were filled with students studying, throwing a frisbee or football, standing behind tables proselytizing about organizations or providing information about that month’s cause. Lounges were packed, the line to my office was long with students ready to ask questions, review a paper, attempt to con me into extended due dates. Some just came by to talk and they’d sit in the office for hours, sometimes on the floor and some in the door as my officemate Tom and I would share stories of our college days, which even then seemed archaic—so when compared to my students today, our own freshman ways are tales from neanderthals.

But they were there, the students, laughing and talking, enlivening the office and the next day the classroom, trying a bit harder, doing a bit more.

When cell phones first entered the classroom, they were quickly forbidden, and students’ common claim was they carried one just in case of an emergency. That evolved to constant texts and phone calls before and after class, which morphed to phones behind books and in laps during lectures. In recent years when I walk down the hallway to the classroom it is quiet, deafeningly so, as if no one is going to be in the room when I turn into the doorway. But of course they are there, staring at their phones, texting their friends from middle school, watching TikTok videos. One semester with fourteen weeks gone I asked them the names of those sitting next to them, and no one—not one—knew anybody else’s name. I told them they might have spent the semester next to someone who could have been a good friend, a confidant, a soulmate. I remind them someone else in the class might have an answer to some question, a thought that completes theirs. They shrug.

In the beginning, students plagiarized out of books; then they bought papers online; today they turn in AI generated work, which they don’t realize is more often vague and filled with generalities, and while well documented, lacks in any significant attribution that is necessary in excellent collegiate writing, so they do poorly and can’t figure out why.

But there’s something else which has changed and is difficult to define that has something to do with simplicity. In thirty-five years the world has grown more angry, more impatient, and aggressive. This isn’t an old prof ragging on their generation staring at me from the silence of the seats; I hear the same thing from twenty-something year old colleagues. Most of today’s students don’t think they can face the day without a few Red Bulls, coffee, or three Five Hour Energy Drinks. This isn’t an exaggeration. In the beginning it seems students had big hearts—helping others in class, stopping by (pre-email, remember) my office to ask for help or offer thanks, willingly teaming up with two or three others for projects and study groups. Today, students’ hearts are big—physically I mean, often fifty percent larger than they should be from the synthetic drinks, in turn causing anxiety, insomnia, intestinal issues, muscle spasms, and excessive restlessness, all from the B vitamins and caffeine coursing through their veins, causing classroom issues including tardiness, inattentiveness, impatience, irritability and a desperately clear lack of focus.

And me? Thirty-five years ago was I a better teacher? Ha. No. I feel so bad for those students those first few years, mostly because of my own arrogance borne of insecurity, my impatience resulting from fear of my own ignorance about a subject. I was almost the same age as them back then. The average age at that college was twenty-nine; exactly my age when I started teaching. So sure, I’ve changed too. But hopefully for the better.

Last week I pulled the chair in front of students, most of whom could be my grandkids, and I sat quietly for a bit. I told them

you just arrived at college this year and within a few weeks a half dozen adults my age want to know what major you wish to declare to invest your entire college education in for the next four years, what discipline you wish to focus on, what your plans are for the rest of your life, all while you’re attempting to navigate fifteen credit hours with professors who have no intention of holding your hands like high school teachers might have, while living with total strangers in tight quarters, sharing bathrooms. For the first time in your life, now, at eighteen, you’re thrust into this whirling processor trying to find your bearings, and you find safety and security in your phone which is your only remaining umbilical back to a more organized and predictable life. I get it.

In the beginning, when I first started teaching—I go on—students were forced into dealing with this new life with little ability to retreat, and it is how they found out what they’re capable of. And when they did, their energy didn’t come from a can; it came from knowing they could handle so much more than they thought they could.

Do you even know what you’re capable of? Because until you let go, you haven’t moved on.

I stood to leave. Abby, a fine student who takes notes and drinks water from a reusable vessel, asked, “What was college like when you were a freshman?”

I laughed because I have spent the better part of my writing life recently writing about just that. “Terrifying,” I said, and they laughed. “I was not only cut off from home because of the stone-age communication system we used in those pre-historic times, I also went to college ten hours away. I didn’t drink much and lived in a dorm with those who did drink, nonstop, at a time the drinking age was eighteen. I was never a great student so there’s that, and I tried to balance it all by getting involved in the radio station and newspaper and local coffeehouse scene, but that just made me neglect my work even more.” A “D” student in the back sat up and listened.

“You survived, I guess,” he said, reflectively.

“I did. Though it didn’t always seem that way. But I’d go back and do it again in a Monster Drink-infused heartbeat.” We all laughed, which is how I always preferred to leave them.

It’s been thirty-five years since I first walked into B-100, a small auditorium on the Beach campus of Tidewater Community College, to teach a college comp course. I sat in the seats like any other student while thinking of my lesson for my first ever class, as students walked in. Two behind me, of course not knowing who I was, said, “Geez I hope this one’s not an asshole.” I stood up and walked to the front and the faces on those two dropped.

“I hope not too,” I said. “But if I am, be sure to let me know,” and we all laughed.

Yeah, I’d do it again.   

That Student

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Its the end of a semester, finishing up today, and I sit and remember one of my favorite moments as a professor; ironically, it was a day I encouraged a student to quit school. Honestly, not everyone belongs. Not yet.

A student comes to see me. He says he can’t handle the pressure of school. I tell him I think he’s a good student and he says yes, he can do the work, he just can’t stand it. He hates it, he says. He gets bored fast. It’s a good conversation, honest. Had we been somewhere else we would have talked over beers. He looks at his watch and says he has to work in a few hours and sighs. He runs his own roofing company but hates that too. He has six grand invested in equipment and no help and he just dreads doing the work now. He says he’s at some fork in the road, two paths that look the same so he’s frozen, easier to just stay put. He gets quiet and stares at a photograph on my wall of a village in Africa. Looks nice he says, like he wants to say anything to forget what he’s really thinking about. Then he remembers and sighs again. He’s quiet for some time and I find myself drifting.

I worked at a bar. Good money and mindless work; the kind of work where if you don’t think too much about what you’re doing, you can keep on smiling. I know I spent a few years there but it seems like it was always winter, all grey and bone-cold. One morning I woke on a bench near a lake in a state park near my country house, but I didn’t know how I got there. I had to work a few hours later but never made it. I drained my accounts, stuck a little aside, then bought a ticket to Africa. Turns out changing my life, kicking my own ass out of the same ‘ol same ‘ol, was as easy as jumping off a cliff knowing you’re either going to land on your feet or learn how to fly. Boring disappeared from my life.

But this student has trouble talking about it, so I talk: I tell him I get that feeling in my chest too. Tight, constricting, difficulty breathing. You know what I’m talking about. It’s the sense that something needs to change. It’s the Philosophy class with five minutes left of three hours and the prof starts another chapter because there are still five minutes left; it’s the meeting you can’t tolerate but you’re in a row of seats with too many people on both sides so you can’t leave; it’s that this-homily-is-way-too-long feeling. It’s the feeling you’re just one day away from something else, but then that day comes and you find yourself one day away from something. It’s the Whitman poem about astronomy; the wide awake at three am feeling and you can’t move so you stare at the alarm clock. Exactly, he says. I’m always staring at the clock, he says. I’d love to know what you’d do, he says.

I tell him about that bar somewhere I didn’t belong. I remember working and then not working but I don’t remember what happened between the two. I just recall waking up one day in the peace-of-mind of another world, centuries away from being behind bars; like I could finally breathe on my own. I let him know I remember dreading the moment between what was and what was next so I just kept pouring drinks, and he nods. He knows. Then I say that one day I didn’t. It was that simple. He looked at me like I was looking in a mirror. Then he says he’s going to work and he leaves. I went to class slightly high on remembering, still somehow slightly down, suddenly lethargic.

Six months later he sends me a postcard from Australia. Don’t know when I’ll be back, it says. When I am, let’s get some beers and talk. I look forward to it but, of course, way leads on to way, and I doubt he ever came back.