It is just about time for my yearly lesson in humility, and I am beginning to get nervous. Each academic year, at some point, I am forced to confront either my own humanity, or that of one of my students. Those lessons are often extremely uncomfortable, and always arrive unexpectedly.
My first experience with that sort of wake-up call was a few years ago in my first year of teaching. My course that semester, a sort of freshman humanities seminar, touched on some fairly sensitive issues about personal faith, organized religion, and gender. Most of my students seemed to be struggling with at least some of the issues. But one student, to all appearances, seemed entirely untouched by our discussions.
The young woman, I'll call her "Elisha," had an answer for everything. While other students opened themselves up and questioned some of their deeply held beliefs, Elisha delivered a pat, simplistic, and entirely predictable response to any challenge to her personal views and convictions. A liberal-arts education seemed to be having absolutely no effect on her. I began to wonder if, perhaps, she wasn't human at all, but an automaton, set to smile, look cute and perky, and parrot back a close-minded catechism.
At the very least, I told myself, this young woman had clearly never known tragedy. She had undoubtedly been raised in a perfect family in an upper-middle class suburb and had sailed through life without having to face any challenges. How else could I make sense of her apparent complacency?
It was only toward the end of the semester, when I ran into Elisha at a local restaurant, that I had to question my own assumptions. Elisha, complete with perfect ponytail and preppy clothes, sat feeding a severely mentally and physically disabled man sitting next to her. She introduced me to her brother, who smiled and drooled on his shirt, and to her parents, two fairly meek and haggard-looking middle-aged people.
After making polite conversation, I walked away dazed. Because of my own feelings of inadequacy in reaching Elisha, because I could not get her to express my own cynicism and doubt, I had reimagined her as somehow incapable of confronting life, as less experienced, mature, and self-aware than I was. I had even gone so far as to assume that her sunny disposition meant that she had had no experience with hardship.
In actuality she probably had more opportunity than many of my other students to consider issues of justice, injustice, diversity, inclusion, and pain in the world. That encounter taught me to resist the urge to judge students or assume that certain exterior qualities bespeak inner conformity. In the intervening years I have tried to retain that lesson, and to apply it daily, but it didn't end my own education. Each year has led to new epiphanies in the classroom, often conceived in difficult circumstances.
One year a racist statement uttered by one of my students led me to hold special meetings about racism on the campus and see an ugly side of college life that is usually kept hidden. Initially, I was so shocked by the incident that I had trouble formulating a response. But several African-American students in my class weren't so surprised. More attuned than I to hints of racism, they knew this particular student would cross a line, sooner or later. Because of that incident, I learned to pay far more attention to the tones and undertones of discourse in my classroom.
Last year my lesson involved the death of my grandmother. Do you know how many times I have made light of students' loss of grandparents? I'm sure I'm not the only professor who has joked about the timing and frequency of such occurrences. "My papers are due next week, I wonder how many students will kill off their grandmothers to get an extension?" Or, "Is there a limit to how many grandparents one kid can lose in a college career?"
Even when I had the decency to believe the students, I was often somewhat dismissive of their emotional distress. Life, after all, is full of losses. They were lucky to have known their grandparents into adulthood.
What I realized last year, however, is that the trauma you experience from the death of a family member or a friend is not necessarily about the person. My grandmother, frankly, was a hard woman. She was also in her late 90s, suffering from dementia, and more than ready to relinquish this world. To be honest, I had very little emotional connection to her. However, she was my last living grandparent, my last tie to the world that came before me. I felt the loss of that line of communication very keenly. It was the end of an era for me and left me aware not only of my own mortality and connectedness to family, but also of my students' potentially similar feelings.
This year, with that newfound knowledge, I have tried to be more sensitive to the emotional traumas that students are going through. That doesn't mean I always grant them extensions. Rather, it means that I take the time to look them in the eyes, to show some simple human kindness in the face of their loss.
Each of those lessons stays with me. When I find myself too easily categorizing students and their life experiences, assuming that I know their particular pain, or rolling my eyes over their excuses for missing class or deadlines, I remember the acute shock of finding myself in the wrong, of not treating my students with the humanity that we all deserve.
I have no doubt that at some point this year, I will be caught out again. It may be difficult, but both I and my teaching will benefit from the experience.
