This summer my writing students from Loyola University New Orleans are scattered all over the country. Some are on glorious beach vacations, others are no doubt grumbling about ho-hum restaurant jobs, and a few are proudly pounding keyboards at summer internships and sending me e-mails about the stories they are writing.
But as this season's hurricane alarm sounds, I know where many of us will be -- glued to the television, holding our breaths and praying that the university and the city we love will be safe.
The spring semester ended with questions that I had never heard before in the classroom: How many times will we have to evacuate if we go to summer school? How long will I be gone from New Orleans if another storm hits? Do you think I should transfer to another college? My students did not know if they were saying goodbye for three months or forever.
It was an emotionally exhausting and strangely uplifting semester from day one.
My very first conversation was with a thin, distraught freshman. He wandered past my office that first Monday morning, clutching his schedule as if it were a compass. He had found his classroom, but there was no one there. He checked and rechecked the room number. He pointed at the computer printout. I ushered him into my office, replete with plants, chocolates, and a teapot to make my new students feel comfortable. On the wall I had taped Loyola's instructions for dealing with mental distress.
I asked the questions you always ask the first day -- like, Where are you from? He was from a Mississippi beach town.
"Is your family OK?"
"Yes, ma'am."
A 42-foot wall of water had slammed his childhood home, he said. All that was left was a concrete slab. This was his first semester of college. He was a music major. We both played the piano. I told him I lost my home, too. We got teary-eyed while chuckling over the difference between his 42 feet and my mere 11.5.
We said little after that. There was no need. I knew that everything he wore -- the clean jeans, the T-shirt, the sneakers, the book bag -- was brand new, perhaps gifts from a stranger or church group. That he had lost his music collection, every book he ever had, maybe a pet or even a neighbor.
I knew because some of those things had happened to me. After several months of losing control over everything, we were all walking around in a daze, clinging to schedules and grateful for a room with a number on it and a time when everyone would be sitting there in neat little rows, whispering or surfing the Internet instead of listening to a writing instructor warn about run-on sentences.
Writers must be sharp observers of life. So my semester's goal was to get 55 students, mostly freshmen, to see more and hear more. I did not realize then that Katrina had already taught them that.
"I am 18 years old. I was there. I watched a tree crash into the bedroom of my neighbor's 3-year-old son, and my Grandpa dying from medical conditions worsened by stress and heat, and my brother exerting himself until he vomited as he sawed through the trees trapping our family, and my Grandma praying for weeks that someone would find her lost brothers. . . . No power for 36 days, no help, no money. I'm back home now. I have trouble talking about it. I need someone to make it better."
That student paper came from an assignment called "163 Words for President Bush." The assignment was designed by Lisa Martin, a professor of communications at Loyola, who had been disturbed because Bush had dedicated only 163 words of his 5,000-word-plus State of the Union address, to the Gulf Coast. The assignment was to write exactly 163 words to the President. I gave it to two of my writing classes.
Another assignment involved doing research and keeping a daily journal on a living creature. Despite the devastation encircling us, new life was hatching and molting and squawking. I wanted my students to see it. Through them I learned about duck courtship rituals and spider habits at 4 a.m. -- apparently the hour that spiders like to feast on mosquitoes and Loyola students come home for the night.
The 18-year-old author of the Bush letter above became the class champion of squirrels. A petite, bushy-haired Cajun redhead, she tracked squirrels in Audubon Park and also perused the strange world of the cyber-squirrel. The class loved her paper about the more than 500 Web sites venerating or denigrating her creature.
Most of my students survived the semester, and a few positively thrived and published. But I felt I somehow failed the handful who became ill or just disappeared. Some could not cope with multiple losses and life in a disaster zone: losing a family home, grandparents who died after Katrina, a classmate who died of bacterial meningitis, friends who had just not returned to school.
The students who dropped out taught me that sometimes it is perfectly acceptable to admit: "I just can't do this. I do not have to finish absolutely everything I start. My health is more important than work or school." They also taught me that I could not make their world right again. I had no answer to classroom questions like "If New Orleans is under water by 2050, what will happen to our degrees?"
Regularly reading a newspaper in my class had always been a sacrosanct assignment. But last semester, stories on weakened levees, hot spots of arsenic and fiberglass particulates, leaky landfills, and rising suicide rates were so overwhelming that even I stopped reading The Times-Picayune. Two students started to cry in class when discussing a story on future evacuations. By April stories were warning of a monster hurricane season. Students shuffled into class and plopped down with the enthusiasm usually reserved for their dentist.
"What's the point of this?" one asked as I took attendance that last month. "It's all going to happen again. We won't be here in the fall."
So I threw out the rules and lightened up the syllabus. A final essay on citizenship became a humor-writing assignment. One student was so thrilled that she wrote two papers instead of one. For two weeks, students read aloud during the "Communications Writing Comedy Hour" and we howled.
I completely bumbled into one of the most valuable lessons about teaching that I learned this semester. By sharing my grief, I could help my students grieve and get on with life. It was on a Thursday morning, when President Bush came to New Orleans and declared it "a heck of a place to bring your family." I was in my office crying because I had just gotten off the phone with a wrecking company. My Toyota truck had sat underwater for three weeks, and I had just left it there, rotting with more than 100,000 other vehicles all over the city. Months later, a scrap dealer was offering me $25 for it.
I felt guilty crying about a car when neighbors had drowned, but I decided to give it a proper send-off before the wrecker arrived. A friend and I drove out at sunset, with a good bottle of champagne. It was dark and stinky in the dead zone. No one had returned on my block and all my neighbors' stuff still sat rotting in the open caskets of their living rooms. We popped the cork and, between swigs, poured the champagne over the truck. Spontaneously, I picked up a concrete chunk of my bulldozed home and hurled it through the truck window. It resounded with a most satisfying smash.
"Do it again!" my buddy yelled.
We laughed like maniacs.
I told that story to my students, thinking they would laugh. I wasn't sure. It was so personal. But I was going by my gut, not my syllabus, and that is what got me through the semester.
A few days later, a student approached me shyly. A young friend of hers had been very depressed because Katrina swallowed the new Camry his parents gave him for college. He'd left it sitting there, rotting, just as I had. She told him about my ceremony. Together they gave it a champagne bath.
