Teaching in the fall semester was miserable — that frequent feeling of a student’s fingers slipping between mine, pulling away, and spiraling out into nothingness. Weeks later an email would arrive: “Sorry, Dr. Sims, I’m trying to do better.” The reasons last semester felt so bad are easy to pinpoint yet so myriad and distinct that it seems futile to bother listing them at all.
Bone-deep burnout and the care obligations heaped upon me by my institution felt like a lead vest as I limped across the finish line in December. I know other faculty and staff members felt the same way. Sure we got through it, but we can’t go on like this. So what do we do differently as a new semester gets underway?
I have spent the last few weeks recovering and reflecting, looking for solutions. I cannot control Covid-19 variants. I am not responsible for the emotional well-being of everyone I work with or for. Campus policy and government decisions are made behind closed doors. But I’m preaching to the choir here: We all feel powerless. Yet that is only part of the problem, and my deepest thinking has led me to another conclusion.
In this moment, meaninglessness is as much the root cause of our distress as powerlessness is.
The core of our collective existential crisis rests on a lack of meaning. Everything we do feels pointless. Our actions, choices, and hard work often seem to come to nothing. What was special — even sacred — seems to bear no value. Of course, this diminishing of significance is a coping mechanism forced on us by a global pandemic. No graduation ceremony, holiday party, or wedding? That’s OK. We don’t need those things anyway. They don’t matter, or they don’t matter as much as we thought they did.
For most people, that line of thinking inevitably leads to bargaining for good health: If I give up cherished traditions, habits, and social connections with little complaint, then at least I will stay safe from the virus. We are left with the conclusion that the one thing that does matter — as everything else falls away — is that we are unified in protecting ourselves and our loved ones from harm. Health still matters. Not dying of Covid-19 matters.
Of course, you can see where this is going. Fear and division over vaccines and masks have left us on shaky ground, wondering if others care about the same things that we care about, or about us.
Where does that leave us then? Where do the leaders go from here? I am not a politician, a corporate CEO, or a campus administrator, but I am a leader nonetheless. As an educator, I am in charge of my classroom, leading my students through our course and their university experience. After much reflection, this is where I have landed: We need to make our experiences matter again.
While that perspective can be applied broadly in our personal and professional lives, my focus here is on teaching and on specific ways to reinvigorate meaning in the college classroom.
But first we need to mull over the widespread shift to the “pass/not-pass” grading policies adopted by many institutions, including my university, to reduce pressure on students and accommodate Covid-related complications. Our policy allows students to opt out of a letter grade for all courses — including the high-stakes, required ones — and make that decision up until the end of the semester. (Although students have a choice, faculty members have not been relieved in any way from the heft of grading, which, for an associate professor of writing, is onerous.)
Let me be clear: Rethinking assessment practices is absolutely the right move in this historic moment. (In fact, elementary schools could take a hint from colleges and universities, and let up on the homework for our overworked little fourth graders.) Giving students grading options is, generally speaking, a good idea and an effective way to reduce their anxiety.
A key byproduct of a pass/not-pass policy, however, is that it amplifies the collective feeling of meaninglessness. For performance-driven students raised in a culture in which winning is paramount, removing grades removes significance. If getting a good grade in a class does not matter, then why does the class itself matter? Of course they can opt for a letter-grade assessment, but why take the risk? Why do the extra work when your peers aren’t?
It seems safe to say that, despite some detractors, we collectively agree that education matters and that classroom learning has value. But it does not feel as if it has value. It does not feel valuable in the same way as prepandemic education. The pass/not-pass grading options, the masked disconnection, the fluctuating attendance, the technological interference of recording in-person classes, and the lenient late-work policies have coalesced to produce a feeling of irrelevance. Why are we here? What are we doing?
As it turns out, those questions are the way back. They are the solution. In planning for the new semester, I’ve asked myself those questions, and, equally as important, I plan to pose them to my students: Why are you here? Why does this matter?
In an effort to bring back meaning to my students’ and my own classroom experiences, these are the changes I plan to make:
Focus on the big picture. Rather than building lessons that lead directly to the production of an essay or assignment, I will present students with the themes of the course, and we will spend significant time thinking, reading, and discussing them — without a required product attached.
For example, I teach an “Advanced Writing” course in which one of the key learning objectives is for students to explore the ethical and civic responsibilities of their future professions. For the new semester, I am putting together a reader stocked with diverse ethical arguments. We are going to spend at least three weeks ruminating on our own and others’ views of right and wrong, on what it means to build an ethical society, and on articulating what we need, believe, and can contribute as members of a profession and as citizens. There will be credit/no-credit tasks and stand-alone lessons without a direct tie-in to the graded paper.
After the first month of class, students will know the values of their peers, they will have reflected on their individual morals, and they will have identified what is necessary to construct an ethical society. I plan to verify that knowledge via conversation and observation during class time rather than in a graded essay.
Emphasize unity over individualism. It’s critical to actively work against the feelings of disconnection caused by months of isolation and screen time. I hope to accomplish that goal through two concrete measures:
- First, as the leader in the room, I will not allow the value of our course or our time together in the classroom to be implicit. In other words, I will ask students to decide that our class matters, to collectively determine the meaning of what we are doing together, and to write about its significance. To make something meaningful, all we need is for people to collectively decide that it matters.
- Second, I am prerecording some lectures for students to watch on their own, and, in lieu of a whole-class meeting, I will use that time to facilitate required peer meetings. As part of their class participation, I will design a rotating schedule of student pairs or small groups who will meet during class time at coffee shops on the campus. These meetings will be for the purposes of reintegrating and resocializing a population of youth who missed proms, graduations, and science fairs, and who spent their Socratic seminars and senior electives on mute. I will provide students with both general and course-related discussion topics, along with guidelines for holding productive conversations and building social stamina. After each peer meeting, students will write their reflections in journals (which I will review for credit). The social learning accomplished during this structured, required out-of-class class time will unify us — pair by pair, group by group — until we feel like a whole class working together.
Lead by example. That’s not exactly a mind-blowing new strategy, but it is a fundamental principle, and I mean to apply it in new ways — specifically, in the realm of radical self-care.
I already check in with my students regularly to chart not just their intellectual growth but also their emotional and mental health: Do they need support? Are they using campus resources? Are they attending to their physical well-being? I train them to identify and ask for what they need, to talk to counselors, and to advocate for themselves.
Who, then, is advocating for me? Like so many other aspects of faculty life, this is a task that no one else will do for me. So be it. I pledge this semester to routinely check in with myself: Do I need support? Am I using campus resources? Am I attending to my physical well-being?
The goal: Show my students what adult accountability really looks like. Demonstrate that we are each responsible, above all else, for ourselves.
I cannot know how these methods will evolve over the course of the semester — what will fail and what will thrive. Ask me in 16 weeks. What I do know is that my classroom matters and that my students will have an experience that matters in my classroom. We will talk about why this time together is significant, we will make meaning, and we will do important things. The rewards of our actions will be the actions themselves and the knowledge that we tried to build something meaningful together.
