Well, so much for spring. It was nice while it lasted.
Since I’m icebound this morning, I thought I’d squeeze in a hasty post. After that I must climb down into my essay-grading bunker, from which I may never return. I just happen to like the MRE pudding.
Over the past week I’ve enjoyed a handful of reassuring professorial moments, which is an oddity insofar as profs usually have to steer the ship with the guidance of classroom affect alone. Said affect isn’t the most reliable compass, since skilled students can learn over the course of a college career to feign interest and investment. Of course, the converse is also true–sometimes the most engaged, avid students will spend 50-75 minutes staring silently at the floor. As a result, a little transparent encouragement can go a long way toward making a prof feel confident about his practice.
Accordingly, I was delighted when a colleague stopped me in the copy room to pass along praise from one of my former composition students (our football team’s quarterback, as it turns out). Said student is an enormously talented writer and gifted scholar in general, which tends to be a worrisome commodity–as I aim for the provisional classroom mean in terms of overall skill, I’m always concerned that the students at the extremes will become bored or overwhelmed. Knowing that my approach worked for one of the sharpest knives in that particular drawer helps to allay those apprehensions, at least for awhile. I’ll be fretful again by Wednesday, but I’ll enjoy the feeling while it lasts.
More encouraging still was a visit from a nontraditional student who’s facing one of the classic collegiate crises of conscience. He’s in his 40s and nearing graduation, and only late in his career did he realize that he hearts himself some English. Knee-deep in student loans and considering graduate school, he’s facing the inevitable question: what does one do with an English major? I’ve been in those shoes myself, and I fielded his version of the question as well as I could (it doesn’t hurt that I was a late starter bowed under the yoke of student loans myself). What I found reassuring, however, was his motive for coming to see me: unlike some of his other profs, who seem to him bitter like Canadian coffee, I strike him as one who is singularly satisfied with his career choice. If that impression is coming across to him, I can hope that it’s making it out to all of my students. Perhaps more than anything else, I think that satisfaction is one of the best advertisements for our English wares.
Finally, I received some sidelong reassurance from an unexpected source. Last fall, following a talk in which our young poets were urged to search for secondary mentors against anticipated turnover in our creative writing faculty, I was approached by a student who asked me to read his work. I did, and I thought it very fine, but it struck me as somewhat troublesome from a pragmatic point of view. This student has an uncanny knack for appropriating and reimagining the stylistic quirks of E.E. Cummings. While I thought his work was exceedingly accomplished (I’ve seen bad imitations of Cummings before, my own among them), I worried that the poetry editors of the world might find it simply derivative. If he intends to make a career of writing verse, I told him, he might find the going difficult, and I urged him to seek the counsel of our creative writing faculty to get a better sense of how his work might be received. Aside from a few hallway greetings, I haven’t spoken to the student much since. My advice was the best I could offer, but I suspect it was unwelcome.
During the past week, however, I had the opportunity to speak to one of our distinguished poets, one who is preparing to retire and is helping the department to sift through new job candidates. After a job talk we walked back to the department; he had only lately learned that I wrote poetry, and we covered much of the conversational territory one might expect. I happened to bring up the aforementioned student in passing, however, which yielded a spontaneous, heartening response: the veteran remarked on his promise, though he wished the student could muster the gumption to venture beyond Cummings.
Offering students advice or perspective beyond my usual purview is always a little giddy–the gulf between meaning well and doing well always seems unusually wide to me in such instances. Much of the harm a prof can do is incidental or accidental, and sometimes the things we feel we ought to tell our students aren’t easy to communicate. Given such anxieties, I think it’s worth remembering that we are surrounded by folks who are in the same position, folks who fret about doing the same kind of damage or failing to offer the right kind of help–folks who, like us, can only venture their best guesses under virtually identical circumstances.
For that reason, even a little corroboration and commiseration can go a long, long way.
