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.