Student Lives

Reading student essays this semester, I was reminded of something I have always known but too often forget: students are not biographically invisible. They are not simply, only, generically, students.

One of my students, a young man from Puerto Rico, described studying, during his freshman year in high school, with his best friend, the only son of a man everyone knew but no one openly acknowledged as a powerful drug lord. Another young man, born in a metropolitan inner city, was abandoned as a child by his mother and lived in a series of foster homes, most of which devalued what the word “home” connotes. Only an unbanishable drive to learn and a talent for football got him to a desk in my Freshman Composition class. A third young man, mugged at gunpoint, still carries the trauma with him, embodied, visceral, inextinguishable, resistant to every therapeutic gesture. His desk is often empty. A female student’s back-home boyfriend was growing increasingly distant; another lost her mother to a brain tumor; still another confessed her addition to Facebook and worried that the medium of the computer screen would displace her desire, or ability, to fully inhabit real-life social relationships; still another, with ADHD, was contemplating discontinuing his medication.

Other students narrate happier stories: loving parents who sacrificed for their well-being; thick networks of caring friends; sports successes and sports failures that catalyzed personal growth; travel to other regions of the country or to other countries, from which they returned chastened by what they had so casually considered themselves entitled to; video game rivalries; books that absorbed them, transported them so completely into a clock-frozen now that they forgot they held the book in their hands; religious belief that guided and inspired, or wavered and was abandoned; sudden moments of transcendence, of insight, of understanding—unmediated moments fully recognized as suffused with meaning.

Students have lives, lives that extend far beyond the classroom we occupy and its cabined agenda of thesis and support, of fluid expression and patterns of organization, of spelling and comma splices, of standard usage and the MLA documentation system. Students have experiences, intense and textured, that echo in the world if I am attentive enough to listen rather than hear. In their writing they struggle to give their lives language, to learn how to make events signify, to make the world intelligible, to enflesh it, give it a pulse, make in breathe in synchronicity with their need to understand it, grasp it, make it reveal itself. “Listen,” I must continually remind myself; “pay attention.” I must remember that I know that they have lives and purposes and intentions with values firmly sutured to them, remember that my classroom world, so engrossing to me, so self-enclosed and self-evidently significant, so islanded in its disciplinary structure, is not their world, nor the much wider world of choice and contingency and contradiction they stand poised to enter.

Such remembering makes teachers both the students’ ally and the bearers of their discipline’s standards. Teachers do well, in other words, when they both affirm and challenge. The two are really the same gesture. We affirm and challenge when we recall that, etymologically, the word “educate” means to lead forth and bend our effort toward eliciting from students that which it is in them to be, drawing them out into the articulation of what had been inchoate, into the recognition of what had been shadowed and barely glimpsed. We affirm and challenge when we create learning environments where ideas can be inhabited rather than paid a cursory visit, where thoughts await deliberative judgment, where analyzing supplants merely witnessing, where students chronicle rather than observe only. We affirm and challenge when we dare students to know, double dare if necessary, when our expectation and assessment is based what constitutes excellence in a particular endeavor. We affirm and challenge when we recall that the simple words “you can do it” are the empowering grace of intellectual courage and perseverance. We affirm and challenge when we enable them to see that the world is made, not given, and because it is made it can be remade, that its conditions, as John Dewey says, can be adjusted, rather than their having to adjust themselves to fit those conditions.

Students have lives, lives they may wish to forsake completely or embrace fully, lives that are anguished or contented, lives that are stammers of doubt or shouts of confidence. They do not, should not, speak the grammar of our lives. Theirs has its own syntax, and we do well when, and only when, as Walt Whitman says, we “teach straying” from us so they can find the richness of its expression.

A Change of Season

The squirrels have been unusually active in recent weeks, scampering down the elm and maple trunks, venturing out across the backyard to scrounge out and secure whatever edible nuggets they can find, then scampering up again and across the skywalk of limbs to stock the larder of their nests. They are hunkering down in anticipation of winter. I, too, have been hunkering, clearing eve troughs, raking the leaves that I am convinced have conspired to deposit themselves in my yard, detaching hoses from spigots, transporting cans of paint from the garage to the basement, winterizing the lawn mower and tiller and chain saw, putting up shrink film on windows whose storms will prove insufficient against the cannonade of frigid air winter will hurl against them. The old earth is tilting. A change of season has sent its calling card, several times, and this past weekend an advance party swept in on waves of cold rain and tumultuous winds. Soon, so soon, it will be arriving, a state visit, in full equipage, trumpets fanfaring and pennants flying, that will last for months on end. I find in myself a deep dismay, visceral and embodied, about this fast-approaching caller. I find myself feeling inhospitable.


It wasn’t always so. In my youth I spoke, loudly and fluently, the deep grammar of winter. No temperature-plummet, no weather-inclemency kept me indoors. Snow storms were to be encountered; they were meant to be in the midst of, embedded in, its exuberant energy confluent with my own. With the neighborhood boys, I built snow forts in preparation for snowball battles, sledded on the seemingly perpendicular hill above the playground at St. Antoninus elementary school, and played a mad-scramble hockey on Schott’s Lake, with sticks retrieved from along the shoreline and someone’s knit cap as the puck. Later, into my adolescence, winter meant flooding a large swath of Goerke Field for a community ice skating rink, complete with warming house and recorded music. Budding romances were nurtured by the rituals of carrying a young lady’s skates, lacing them up for her, and, hand-in-hand, clambering up the wooden ramp and onto the ice. Winter meant tobogganing and ski jumping at Bukholt Park; it meant cross-country skiing and snowmobiling; it meant an aesthetic awakening to the eye-dazzling glitter of branches cathedraled with ice and the masonry of wind-troweled drifts; it meant snow shoveling competitions with my dad which, somehow, always ended in a tie, and my mom’s “secret recipe” chili, its magma-like, chile-peppery heat instantly defrosting numbed fingers and toes.


I wish I had gotten that recipe before it, and mom, disappeared behind the veil of Alzheimer’s Disease. And, these days, the only competition snow shoveling poses is with fatigue. I have, it seems, become, almost without my noticing, a tattered coat upon a stick, and my soul’s clap has become an increasingly diminished thing. My season has changed. Winter still sings, but I am no longer in harmony with its song. I no longer watch with rapt attention the whitewashed air of the storm, but eye the plummeting temperature and begin to dread the stiletto-sharp thrust of cold despite being bundled and layered almost to immobility, dread its “hard, dull bitterness,” its checking “mid-vein, the circling race/ Of life-blood.” I no longer delight in “the frolic architecture of the snow,” but wonder how I can muster the strength to clear it, finding myself doubtful whether it will be in me “to arise with the day/ And save [myself] unaided.” I feel, before I feel it, the invasive wet. Yes, winter still sings, but its lyrics tell me of a treacherous terrain where a fall could fracture a hip, where drivers abandon all caution and common sense, and ice-coated branches crack, with rifle-shot clarity, only to fall on rooftops and awnings. Those lyrics tell me of a world from which time has excommunicated me. It’s all I can do to resist the impulse to pull an afghan up to my chin and hibernate, dreaming, perhaps, of the golden shouts of July, the humid hug of August.


In the quantum mechanics of my change of season, there is no Heisenbergian uncertainty. I know my position and momentum simultaneously. They are entangled, for sure. Yet, it is strange, the disappointment I feel at having met with such punctuality the stages of aging: the graying hair, the gastric reflux, the bifocals, the decreased muscle strength, the constricted range of motion, the fine motor skills that are no longer so fine, the intolerance to cold, the disrupted sleep patterns, the achy joints and limbs and sinews that, like Job’s, “know no rest,” the neurons that seem, in increasing numbers, to be cliff diving into pools of oblivion. Somehow, I had thought I was better than that; somehow, I thought I would blaze unconsumed, but I see that biology gives you a poke you cannot ignore, then defriends you without a backward glance. I don’t like it at all, this declensional narrative, this being a “martyr to a motion not my own,” this being ambered in the gummy secretion of time. But what to do, what to do? Resistance is foolish; there is no emancipation from the imperative of matter, which is older than hope, older than prayer, older than memory. Despair is unacceptable; it is an anguished repudiation of the imperative of spirit, a defilement of the heart’s tabernacle. I think I will adopt an unwilling surrender. I hear winter coming; I feel its rasp of difficult truth, and in the liminal space between its advent and presence, I will be stubbornly disobliging, unresignedly resigned, sharing the mood of the narrator in Robert Frost’s poem “Reluctance”: “When to the heart of man/ Was it ever less than a treason/ To go with the drift of things,/ To yield with a grace to reason,/ And bow and accept the end/ of a love or a season?” There is, I think, a grace, perhaps a benediction, in such ungraceful yielding.