Office Hours

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.

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.