Not long ago, a former student walked into my office with some good news. After graduating from our community college and transferring, she had been accepted into a highly competitive nursing program. She’d been a great student, and I’d always thought she would succeed. Now she was on her way.
I have to admit that, for a while after she left, I felt pretty good—about my job, about my college and its mission, about the whole idea that education can improve and transform lives and that we, as instructors, do play an important role in making that happen. Here was a student with dreams, and we had helped her to turn them into reality.
The feeling didn’t last long. I began to realize that I knew how well things had gone for her only because she had made a point of telling me. For every success story that faculty members hear from a student or an alumni publication, we never find out for most of our students how their stories end. We never know what, ultimately, happens to them.
That is the strange reality of teaching. For a few months, we are front and center in our students’ lives—or so we hope. They are the focus of our courses, our assignments, our examinations, our office hours, our meditations in the car ride home. We encourage them. We try to fill the gaps in their education. In some cases, we try to resolve the unique challenges that they pose to us (as well as to themselves), psychologically as well as academically. We modify our lesson plans and rework our syllabi. We talk about our students with colleagues. We may even consult with an administrator or two for advice, guidance, or suggestions about a lecture, an exam, or a behavior issue.
And then it all comes to an end. Students leave, move on, transfer, graduate, and, quite often, we never see or hear from them again. And we are OK with that.
For us, the process starts over, and we soon find ourselves caught up in new stories, while the previous ones remain largely unresolved. Did Jim, who talked about becoming a therapist, go on to graduate school in psychology? Did Jessica, who argued so passionately in class against the death penalty, make it as a lawyer? We fill in the blanks about them based upon what we know (or think we know), and tell ourselves that their stories ended the way that we hoped.
Teaching, in this regard, is the great open-ended narrative, the romantic fragment, the perpetually unfinished symphony. And, like all great fragments, a good portion of it works on and through our imaginations. As Marjorie Levinson explains in her book The Romantic Fragment Poem, “readers mentally complete/construct such poems by generating the missing parts.” So we, too, complete/construct the educations, careers, even whole lives of our students in between and around the academic calendar, crafting final stanzas and creating fictional conclusions that reinforce the college-leads-to-success narrative.
But, to repeat, we don’t really know what happens to most of them, where they go or what they do. And we must consider the disturbing possibility that some students—maybe most of them—will leave our classrooms, walk out into the world, and never give us, our lessons, maybe even our subjects another thought. Years later, the point of our entire course, or the concept that we drilled so repeatedly and emphatically, could be a multiple-choice question that they still get wrong.
There will be a slight pause here while I have a midlife crisis.
For all of the assessment data that we could compile, or all of the graduation rates that we could point to to prove our success and reassure ourselves that we are doing a good job, in the end, at the instructor level, our success or failure—or, better yet, our sense of success or failure—exists somewhere in our minds. It’s somewhere in that blank space at the end of the story, that point where we can tell ourselves that we made the handoff in the relay race and that the runner is speeding off safely to victory. Even if they don’t swear allegiance to our disciplines after being in our courses, we like to think that they got the message and will put it to some use down the road, whether or not they remember our names.
And we might as well believe that because the full extent of our influence is nearly impossible to measure.
In a December 2012 Faculty Focus essay on this very topic, Maryellen Weimer called teaching “an act of faith.” We have to believe in it, she wrote, even when we do not see the proof that we have done some good: “Students can be profoundly changed by a course, and the teacher may never find out.”
Months or even years after they’ve graduated, students may develop an interest in a topic that they first learned about in our classrooms. Without ever realizing or crediting us for it, a student may understand some allusion, get more out of some film, contribute to some conversation, figure out some mathematical equation, or make sense of some scientific data all because of something we said or did—because of a paper that they struggled with, an exam that they studied for, or a lesson that went completely as planned or horribly awry.
While the students who come back to thank us for changing their lives in some profound way certainly do stand out, the ones who have been changed in only a small way are still successes, too. We may never hear their stories, but we need to have faith that they exist.
A few years ago, someone pointed out that my 2-year-old daughter probably wouldn’t remember most, if any, of the wonderful things that we had done for her at that age. She wouldn’t remember her birthday party, our family vacation, or a kiss goodnight. And yet, knowing the likelihood of that, I would do all of those things again tomorrow. I want to believe that those things still matter on some level, that they have helped to shape my daughter’s sense of the world and are responsible, in some way, for her sense of self and belonging.
The same goes for my students: I want to believe that what I do in the classroom matters on some level, that it has helped to shape their sense of the world and is responsible, in some small way, for their sense of self and belonging. If teaching is an act of faith, then we need to believe in order to do our jobs.
Douglas L. Howard is chair of the English department on the Ammerman Campus of Suffolk County Community College, and is editor of Dexter: Investigating Cutting Edge Television (2010) and co-editor of The Essential Sopranos Reader (2011) and The Gothic Other (2004).
