April is the cruelest month, if only in academe, and like many faculty members, I’ve been exhausted for weeks. A yellow coat of pollen covers the benches and windows of both universities where I am an adjunct, and the papers I’m grading are at their longest and most complex, as are my meetings with students.
It’s at this point in the semester that I tend to become more of a stickler. I try my best to stay even-keeled with my students, but the more tired and overwhelmed I become, the less patience I have. That doesn’t mean I grade any harder or start mocking them in class (despite the occasional temptation). It does mean that slackers get less of my sympathy than they might in February.
My classes have been going well this semester. But as always, there are students who stopped posting on the course blog months ago, or failed to turn in an essay, and then ignored my e-mails requesting that they come chat with me during office hours about their endangered grade. They ignored me until now, of course.
This week, as I do once a semester, I spent a few long days in one-on-one student conferences, discussing the drafts of their research papers. For some students, our meeting marked the first time they had been to my office, and for those who were slipping, in terms of their grades, I took the opportunity to let them know where they stood.
I go into those meetings as my most impatient, toughest self. I think: “Well, I’ll just tell him that he’s on track to fail and we’ll see if he’ll answer my e-mails now.” Or: “It’s been so long since I’ve seen this student, I don’t even remember what the girl looks like. If she thinks I’m going to cut her slack on this late paper, she’s out of her mind.” Then I push the little pumping lever on my fancy desk chair and boost myself up high, all smuglike. Throughout the week, it slowly deflates.
I teach mostly first-year composition, and I recall being warned in graduate school about the unanticipated duties that go along with teaching such courses. For many students, composition instructors become unwitting guides and counselors—thanks to the small size of writing classes compared with the 100-plus students in most other first-year courses.
“They’ll come to you with questions about everything from registration to the shuttle bus,” I was told in graduate school, and I’ve found that to be true. What I wasn’t told was that students would also come to me with heftier problems than a confusing transportation schedule.
It was on Monday that the first student cried in her meeting with me about her failing grade. I awkwardly attempted to comfort her, and then did some math so she knew what grades she needed to earn on the final two assignments in order to pass. I have been teaching for a few years now, and I know that such teary conversations happen, although they seem to occur some semesters more than others. I shook it off.
A few hours later, when the burliest male student in my course this semester welled up as I showed him all of the zeros in my grade book, I responded in the same way—with math and sympathetic smiling.
In one of the last meetings of that day, a student told me that her parents were getting a divorce and explained her role in the custody battle over her younger brother, and how frequent weekend trips home had left her with less time than she would have liked for some assignments. We worked out a catch-up plan, and then I tried—less than successfully—to shake off her problems, too.
The next morning, an exhausted student who had missed her conference the day before caught me right before I left my office to teach. She couldn’t even get a sentence out before she started to sob. She did not have a draft. All of her grades were slipping because she was involved in a demanding extracurricular academic activity, which she has told me she prays will help her eventually get into law school. She has to travel for the organization, and compete, and she does not know how she can possibly finish the long list of required assignments. We talked it through and attempted to set up a plan for her, though I wasn’t particularly optimistic.
Each student I met with listed the barriers to academic success that they had encountered over the past few months. Some of those explanations were legitimate, some less so. I did my best all week to be firm, but sympathetic. By Thursday of that week, I was joking to my boyfriend that I should have a couch in my office and be earning significantly more an hour.
And then, early the next day, a young man whom I had barely seen in my class all semester appeared in my office doorway. He asked me, with his voice shaking, if I remembered saying, in an e-mail to him, that I was there if he needed to talk. He told me about the severe depression he’d been battling all semester, and then we discussed his grades, which were almost exclusively D’s and zeros.
He had started seeing a school counselor, he told me, but still felt at a loss. “I just cannot get it together,” he said, “and I’m so angry at myself. And my parents are going to be even angrier. It’s like I’m waking up now, and feeling a little bit better, but looking around and realizing all of the damage I did when I couldn’t get out of bed.”
At that point, the tired, mid-April, hard-ass version of me disappeared completely.
Comforting my students is so utterly different from comforting my friends. It’s such an awkward line I have to stand behind. I can’t hug my students, so I nod sympathetically to the girl crying in the bathroom over boyfriend problems. Or I put my hand on a sniffling student’s arm as I walk her down the hall, but even that feels odd, like I am overstepping some unspoken professor/student boundary.
I can’t ask particularly personal follow-up questions either. And I certainly can’t comment honestly about what they tell me much of the time. I don’t feel right saying “Damn, that sucks. You’re right,” or “Well, he sounds like a jerk to me,” or even “My freshman year I fell apart, too.”
This last statement is true, but I felt wrong and exposed and unprofessional the only time I said it to a different devastated young student who needed a special kind of help that I was not qualified to deliver. I’d meant it as a comfort, but of course, the student couldn’t imagine a similarity between us, and I wished I’d kept it to myself.
And so, instead, I nod a lot. I tell them that in a year, all of this—whatever it is—will be behind them. When they say they’re sorry about crying, I tell them not to be. When they apologize for missing assignments, I smile and promise them I don’t take it personally. I tell them I understand. I offer them water. Gum. Tissues. An extra day of leeway on a small assignment. I constantly suggest campus counseling, wishing I could mandate that they speak to someone more capable than I am of saying the right thing.
I’m not implying that every one of these students is putting in their best effort, or that they should all pass my class (some surely won’t). It’s possible that some of them hope that by telling me their sad stories, I might be swayed to give them a passing grade.
What I am saying is that I feel for them. My students occasionally frustrate me, usually when I see them—smart, creative kids—putting forth minimal effort. When they frustrate me, that makes it easy for me forget what college is like, and what being 18 is like. I forget that they are still kids in a lot of ways, not fully able to cope with the pressures of an academically demanding program, of overbearing parents, or of law school looming ahead.
Do I wish sometimes that they would work harder? And that they would talk to me at the first sign of a problem rather than waiting for me to sit them down and force them to talk? Of course. But I also remember that the work of school and making friends and living away from home for the first time and growing up is taxing. I remember my own first year away and—although I don’t do it—I want to give them a hug and then an A, and send them home to rest and prepare for their next big paper, their next big crisis.
