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It’s not about the job, I thought, in looking over the writing I had done for this project of documenting the effects of the coronavirus on my teaching / administrative life. I am a non-tenured faculty member in the writing department of a large Midwestern research institution; in addition to teaching one class each term, I serve as Associate Director of our first-year writing program: some 7000 students and 50 faculty, most of whom are also non-tenure track, each year. What this experience has taught me was-- whenever I came close to the edge of despair—to look for those moments of grace that would carry me, and the others of my world, through a world that felt like it was dissolving.
From the point of view of my administrative job, the current crisis contributed to a perpetual feeling of being behind: compounded by that larger sense of things being beyond our respective control. Where once my work life encompassed a series of buildings central to campus (and my “walking the neighborhood,” as I fondly call my own building, which houses the offices of my writing colleagues), it became restricted to a floating laptop that moves among two primary home spaces. Not everything is about work, though; indeed, little is. So much happened around the edges of my now-Zoom and phone conversations with colleagues. Their dogs barked, and cats emerged on their laps. Children frequently interrupted, with “Mama, I’m hungry." A baby coo’d or cried; a parent checked in. Colleagues—mostly tenure-track-- called me at all hours, fearful about spouses and partners with medical vulnerability. Other issues emerged in the interstices of phone and Zoom connections: those with partners in the medical profession, trooping in daily, and bravely, to the battlefields of our hospitals. They worried about their adult children, now unemployed, and other family members. They worried about money. I sensed the anxiety bubbling up everywhere, under the surface, in so many conversations I had with others. There was something totally absurd in pretending to continue with normal life and work routines, when nothing around us felt normal.
And yet we went on.
Twice a week, my corona-days were punctuated by benchmarks: admin (zoom’d) meetings in the morning, my own (zoom’d) teaching in the evening. It was an extraordinarily strange time to not be in my office. On the one hand, there were no knocks on the door (so there are no interruptions—theoretically speaking), but there were also, frequently and alas, no responses. All the usual administrative issues that arose in my administrative job (a student complaint; a colleague’s thorny schedule request for next academic year; a transfer student asking for re-assessment of her writing course)—so many of these ‘odds and ends’ of the job felt on hold now, though they remained out there somewhere, in the wings, waiting, visible only through the occasional e-mail. Ordinarily, I would follow up by going down a hallway to meet with that colleague, or I would run into them when in mailroom or faculty lounge. Often, that student or colleague would knock on my door, so that I could see them in person. Instead now I had to send an e-mail back to the original writer, or to someone else who might assist, and it was like sending a message in a bottle, tossing that e-mail into a sea of silence. Every once in a while, there was a quick turnaround response, but most of the time, not. Each little bug of a problem ended up taking forever to resolve. And beneath it all was this problem: that you never knew the reason for another person’s silence. If they did not respond for even a day or two, your mind started nagging with worry. Are they okay? Should you try calling? Sometimes I did, actually, resort to the phone, but that could be another labyrinth in itself: a rabbit’s hole of search-and-find vis-à-vis the on-line white pages; once, a secretary came to my aid with a wife’s number, so that I could call her to get to the husband, who, apparently, did not use his own cell phone or land-line, nor e-mail, actually.
So many loose ends.
So many black holes.
So there was this sense: that despite this veneer of work going forward, it was not. We were all wading water. Danger lurked everywhere. Who could you trust? This disease was invisible; we could not see it, but we watched its sorry effects late at night on our television screens: the jam-packed emergency rooms, the health aids dressed like Darth Vader, with their masks and weird hazmat suits. In China, health workers wore their name in signs, painted with bright letters, so that people could tell who they were. Only a matter of time, I thought, until we did the same here. No one and nothing felt safe, and the mixed messages did not help. Wear a mask, or not? Get a test, or not? Wash your groceries when you came back from the store? Wash the door handle, the car door, the grocery bag? Friends and I exchanged phone numbers, started checking in on one another. We learned to read numbers, pouring over the stats and graphs country-by-country, state-by-state, county by county. We watched the perversely snail-shaped graph of our own making: that precipitous rise that measured disease, and the ever-so-slow falling off.
I cried when ABC nightly news did that story of the young cancer patient returning home from her last chemo treatment, and all the neighbors out in their driveways, keeping their respectful distance, but essentially cheering her on (a gauntlet of good cheer). It made me think that despite the relative lack of leadership and action at our country’s helm, there was so much good and generosity of spirit on the level of neighborhood, workplace, institution, and state.
So I began to look for moments of grace. I got that e-mail from a former Chinese student, worried about me, asking if I needed anything. I thought for a moment, and then wrote: Not me, but then there was my brother with lung issues, and living in New York City—the epicenter.
The masks she subsequently sent from China, no questions asked, arrived at my brother’s NYC apartment in a matter of days.
Administratively speaking, a new sense of my job emerged. In those periodic meetings with colleagues, I began to notice something new: the resilience and skill with which they were addressing the crisis, when we suddenly found ourselves teaching on-line, three days after spring break. I was proud of my colleagues-- so smart and helpful about teaching, so helpful in this disastrous time. Right before we disbanded, our program had offered a helpful workshop on how to make the transition, and smart faculty members with on-line expertise shared tools and videos on-line (I made immediate use of the one that taught us how to use Zoom). My colleagues and I were like sponges, soaking up new knowledge, new forms of communication, new ways to connect with our students. Over the next several weeks, one wrote to me that her students reported appreciating so much how consistently she "checked in" with them. Another started writing letters to her students, creating a unique back-and-forth chain that linked them together (“I am getting to know my students in a way that I otherwise would never have,” she reported). A third devised and shared with our list serve a distinctive “elephant in the room” assignment, whereby her students reflected in writing (as indeed we are asked to do here), on how the virus had impacted their lives. Still another began to knit masks for her students. There was so much collegial goodwill and support. Guided by our admin team and on our own, we all got it: that it was not about the teaching, but our lives: and how what was happening ‘out there’ was affecting us in the here and now.
But this time was not easy. For all the colleagues who seemed to be managing well, others were more fragile. One day, a teacher called me at home, and in the process of talking, ended up sobbing on the phone. Sitting there in my living room, phone pressed to my ear, I could hear her gulping, trying to catch her breath. Funny how so much emotion could be mediated through a black box (cell phone or laptop). In person, we would have hugged. Now all I could do was listen, tethered as I was to my own two black boxes: the laptop and cell phone, through which my primary link with the world outside existed (beside that third scarier one: the television set with its prevailing anxious tone, its rising stats).
Then two good spirits entered my life. I will call the first L, a therapist who began these massive Zoom webinars, on resilience in a time of crisis. At first I was a bit leery, because of her advocacy of pop culture icons. But by the end of that first session, I was drawn in. For one thing, L had this way of inserting little snippets of wisdom, nuggets that would stay with you after. When you’re scared, look for the helpers, she said. Notice more and judge less. And then: We try too hard to avoid the hard. So many of her words, simple as they seemed on the surface, struck me as true. I found myself looking forward to those late Thursday afternoons, when over a hundred of us would connect with her through Zoom. Taking her lessons to heart, I found I was watching myself more: sensing when a zoom-room’s heat started to rise, when my leg began to thump nervously, when I started muttering, when I got anxious—when I entered what L called “mud mind,” or “popcorn brain”—the clutter that kept us left of center. Whenever that happened, I started practicing the three-breath exercise L had recommended: the first simple slow in-and-out (simply noticing breath); the second observing the tensions in my body and then letting them go, the third breath where I paid attention to a single sense-detail in my immediate space. It invariably calmed, made me present. The beauty was that you could do the three breaths invisibly; no one needed to know. Come home and be present, L would say.
The second gift was J, another campus counselor. Earlier in the semester and in a more normal world, I had arranged for him do a faculty workshop, spottily attended but powerful, on “How to be well, when your students are not.” Now toward the end of the term, I started wondering how I could channel both of these individuals, gifts from a crazy universe that had entered my life at just the right time. So with the support of my program administrator and our graduate assistant, we asked J. to offer an end-of-term session for our first-year writing teachers. J. called it “Teaching in the Pandemic: A Psychological Check-In with FYW Instructors,” and it seemed to be just what is needed. After we did some very typical “pre-flective” writing at the outset, in response to the prompt of what we felt we had lost in the pandemic, J. began to walk us through a two-hour session that vis-à-vis Zoom chat, felt oddly participatory. What are you feeling right now? he would ask, and voila! there would emerge a singular well of emotions listed to the right of our screens. What has it been like for you as an instructor? J would continue, and another list sprouted: hard, crazy, difficult…. And then: What has been lost, as a result of the pandemic? Friendship, closeness, people, time with students... By the time J got to the part where he named the problem, we were so ready to listen. We are surrounded by loss, J said. And then: With so much loss comes grief, and that this grief is hard. This is a time for us to practice compassion, he said: For you. For your students. For each other. Self care is central in dealing with ambiguous grief.
I channeled both J and L this semester into my teaching this semester, as I worked from my laptop, my cell phone. My grant-writing class held mostly seniors, and from a range of majors: professional writing, arts and humanities, forestry, fisheries and wildlife. I found myself wondering how a topic like grant writing might even matter, in such a world, and to these students. Where was the exigency? I asked, as we watched so many grant-funding agencies and philanthropic sources dry up before our eyes. A succession of guest speakers (writers from local agencies) seemed to help, as they acknowledged that problem, and proposed some solutions. Moreover, a number of them were extraordinary in their extended care to the students—as though they too sensed how exceptional this time was, and so they gave of themselves generously to this class of students. One of the more amazing insights came from the guest speaker from our local refugee support center, who talked about how the refugees actually were adjusting quite well to tCOVID, because they had prior experience dealing with trauma. It reminded me of another one of L’s simple-brilliant sayings: that we are all in the same boat, but we are not necessarily in the same storm. J. had said something similar, when he advised: Let others experience grief in their own way.
That night, after the guest speaker left, our class discussed how the pandemic had disproportionately affected communities of color and the elderly—and how funding support, or its lack, was related.
Teaching in the second half of the term, I always started class early, so that I could chat with the students who ‘came early’ to Zoom. Also, because of the virus, I found myself reaching out immediately whenever a student seemed to disappear, to slide away into darkness, and I also set up a number of long cell-phone or Zoom conferences—presumably to talk about their grants-in-progress, but actually to check in with my students about their lives, to make sure they were okay. These pre- and post-class conversations varied week to week, as I began to learn much about my students’ ways of life in the current crisis. One told me, for example, that he struggled with living alone, but refused to go home, because (as a Fisheries and Wildlife major), he was committed to his collection of fish (“and fish are hard to move,” he said). Another student cried, as she talked of the loss of a good family friend to the virus. Still another had trouble keeping up with his schoolwork, now that he was employed additional hours every week, making and delivering food from a local restaurant, in an attempt to “help out his family” (a parent now out of work). Several students were upset by the fact that the well-earned job they had worked so hard to get upon graduation had flat out disappeared. Two other students had lined up stints in Madagascar: with one, I co-wrote the grant proposal to get him the funding to do research on an endangered gecko species; the other had been headed toward two years of the Peace Corps. Both opportunities had since evaporated. And all of them, in one way or another, talked about how hard it was to focus in this extraordinary time.
So in one class, channeling both L and J, I tried something different, beginning by asking my students to write in response to these questions: What has this time been like for you? What has been the biggest challenge, academically or otherwise? What has gone well? (and why?)—and then gave them leave to write on whatever topic struck them as most important in that moment.
For several minutes, and then more, there was just the sound of clicking laptops, punctuated by an occasional dog bark, the rustle of movement. Very early in the virus-impacted world, I had asked my students to keep their mikes on, if possible, because I found I preferred those human sounds and even distractions—those indications of presence—to a silent screen of heads—or names. After about a half hour, and based on a slight shift in the pecking sounds, my students seemed ready to share. Later, when I asked them what it felt like, to have space to write about this, they said things like “new awarenesses,” inspires me”, “Love it – get things out!” “Therapeutic” – indeed, the very kinds of things I imagine my fellow documentarians found, in writing here. Then I talked with my students about how we are all living history right now, and how important it was to write and reflect in times of uncertainty. This was a time of grief, I said (channeling J): about all we had lost, and continued to lose, and how hard it was to accept this loss in a time of uncertainty, when we did not know where or how the losses would end. Finally, I talked about the gifts they had been to me over the term, and I shared with them 3 lessons. First, I said, we are and can be resilient (and I pointed out how patient they had been with my earlier Zoom fumbling; how we had been managing the virus’s impact and the shift to on-line together). In turn, this led to Lesson 2: that two were better than one (Find your helpers, L said). Then that led to Lesson 3, that there were these moments of “shared lights” all round us—as long as we were open to them. I accompanied this last with a Zoomed image of a candle, with flame. Yes, it is maybe corny, I thought, but then L had taught that lesson well, of the wisdom to be found in the simplest image or phrase.
Standing there in my temporary, make-shift work-space at home—at the kitchen counter where my laptop rested on my toaster, at just the right height to allow me to stand, I found my shared light in my students, and in my colleagues, both from my department and beyond (those wise spirits J and L), who taught us how to weather this storm. And this in turn led to Lesson 4: that writing could help us hold time, hold where we were in the moment, give us pause. Writing helped us understand ourselves, and learn the difference between what we could change—and what we could not. In a world that felt like it was dissolving around us, writing helped us live.
Looking back, I have mixed feelings: chagrin at my blind faith that only if I could pass gifts onto others, all would be well; disappointment that it is (still) not; and a kind of steely resolve to take steps toward change.
Today I reckon with my institution, which plans (without seeming plans) to bring us all back to campus this fall. In opposition to the wishes of both students and faculty, as expressed through multiple votes and resolutions, our university president decided not to require vaccines. Two weeks later he announced that mask-wearing would no longer be required indoors-- even by those who were not vaccinated. Yet we know a number of our incoming students will not be vaccinated, and that the Delta variant continues to rage. We are bringing in 7000+ freshmen to live in close quarters. What happens when that first unvaccinated student infects another?
If the institution seems to have failed us, though, my program has not. We have finally instituted directed self-placement, ironically necessitated by the pandemic: the marked absence of ACT/SAT scores by which we used to place students. Three committees now examine our program’s pedagogy, learning goals, and administration from an anti-racist lens. I participate in multiple DEI discussions and anti-racist dialogues-- work that has been challenging, eye-opening, emotional, and always reflective. To use Britzman as quoted by Lindquist, I am learning by “working through.” These dialogues have pulled me into myself, where I see the doubleness of both resistance and buy-in, and how much I have been implicated in oppressive systems, whether consciously or not. In various groups and contexts, my colleagues and I share stories, do fishbowls, are vulnerable. We examine how we are privileged, and what we fear (Gay’s You have to decide how much to risk, sometimes true of a non-tenured faculty member such as myself).
But Gay also said: We need to dismantle the tower; we cannot make ourselves small.
So I re-connected with my longstanding interest in the pragmatics of student retention, and community writing. I worked with a student who wrote a (successful) grant application to resurrect the Black Book, which contains a list of Black-friendly resources both on- and off-campus, to welcome incoming Black students. I gathered a team of faculty and undergraduate international students, to make videos on how to teach multilingual students. I am not sure I would have embraced either project with such enthusiasm a couple of years ago. But the impetus was strong: the protests of last summer catalyzed by the death of George Floyd so painfully visible from our TV sets, just as the pandemic had been one year before. By August, our own graduate students were asking that we integrate more anti-racist pedagogy into our department. They too presented a need for action.
And so I would tell my former self: wake up. As Lindquist put it: DEI work is not what you give your students to read, but what you give yourself to do.
It’s not about the job, I thought, in looking over the writing I had done for this project of documenting the effects of the coronavirus on my teaching / administrative life. I am a non-tenured faculty member in the writing department of a large Midwestern research institution; in addition to teaching one class each term, I serve as Associate Director of our first-year writing program, which consists of some 7000 students and 50 faculty, most of whom are also non-tenure track, each year. What this experience taught me was that whenever I came close to the edge of despair, I could look for those moments of grace that would help carry me, and others. I learned to carry these gifts forward: from others to me, from me to my students and colleagues, and now, to you.
Where once my work life had encompassed a series of buildings central to campus (and especially, my “neighborhood,” as I fondly called the building that housed the offices of my writing colleagues), it now was a floating laptop that moved between two primary home spaces: a dining room, a kitchen. Yet so much happened around the edges of my now-Zoom and phone conversations with colleagues. Dogs barked, and cats emerged on laps. Children interrupted, with “Mama, I’m hungry." A baby coo’d or cried; a parent checked in. Colleagues—mostly non-tenured-- called me at all hours, fearful about spouses and partners with medical vulnerability. Some had partners in the medical profession, trooping out bravely to the hospital battlefields. Others had adult children, now unemployed. The anxiety bubbled up everywhere, in those conversations. There was something totally absurd in pretending to continue with normal life and work routines, when nothing around us felt normal.
And yet we went on.
From the point of view of my administrative job, the current crisis contributed to a perpetual feeling of being behind: compounded by that larger sense of things being beyond our respective control. Twice a week, my corona-days were punctuated by benchmarks: admin (zoom’d) meetings in the morning, my own (zoom’d) teaching in the evening. It was an extraordinarily strange time, to not be in my office. On the one hand, there were no knocks on the door (so ostensibly, no interruptions, even though the work never quite seemed to stop), but that also meant that often, painfully so, there was so response. All the usual administrative issues that arose in my job (a student complaint; a colleague’s thorny schedule request for next academic year; a transfer student asking for re-assessment of her writing course)—so many of the ‘odds and ends’ of the job now felt on hold, though they remained out there somewhere, in the wings, waiting, visible only through an occasional e-mail. Ordinarily, I would have followed up by going down a hallway to meet with that colleague, or I would run into them when in mailroom or faculty lounge. Often, a student or colleague would visit my office in person. Instead, now I had to send an e-mail back to the original writer, or to someone else who might assist, and it was like sending a message in a bottle, tossing that e-mail into a sea of silence. Each little bug of a problem ended up taking forever. And beneath it all was this: that you never knew the reason for another person’s silence. If they did not reply for even a day or two, your mind started nagging with worry. Were they okay? Should you try calling? Sometimes I did, actually, resort to the phone, but that could be another labyrinth: a rabbit’s hole of search-and-find vis-à-vis the on-line white pages; once, a secretary came to my aid with a wife’s number, so that I could call her to get through to the husband.
So many loose ends.
So many black holes.
So there was this sense: that despite this veneer of work going forward, we were all wading water. This disease was invisible; we could not see it, but we watched its sorry effects late at night on our television screens: the jam-packed emergency rooms, the health aids dressed like Dark Vader, with their masks and hazmat suits. In China, health workers wore their name in signs, painted on their suits with bright letters, so that patients (and one another) could tell who they were. Only a matter of time, I thought, until we faced the same here. No one and nothing felt safe, and the mixed messages did not help. Wear a mask, or not? Get a test, or not? Wash your groceries when you came back from the store, or not? Wash the door handle, the car door, the grocery bag? Friends and I exchanged phone numbers, started checking in on one another. We learned to read numbers, pouring over the stats and graphs country-by-country, state-by-state, county by county. We watched the perversely snail-shaped graph of our own making: that precipitous rise that measured disease, and the ever-so-slow falling off.
I cried when ABC nightly news did that story of the young cancer patient returning home from her last chemo treatment, and all the neighbors came out in their driveways, keeping respectful distance to cheer her return. It made me remember that despite the relative lack of leadership and action at our country’s helm, there was so much good and generosity of spirit on the level of neighborhood, workplace, institution, and state.
So I began to look for moments of grace. I got that e-mail from a former Chinese student, worried about me, asking if I needed anything. I thought for a moment, and then wrote: Not me, but what about my brother? The one with lung disease, living in New York City, that epicenter of disease?
The masks the student then sent from China, no questions asked, arrived at my brother’s NYC doorstep in a matter of days.
Administratively speaking, a new sense of my job emerged. In those periodic meetings with colleagues, I began to notice something: the resilience and skill with which they were addressing the crisis, when we suddenly found ourselves teaching on-line, three days after spring break. I was proud of my colleagues-- so smart about teaching, so helpful in this disastrous time. Right before we disbanded, our program had offered a useful workshop on how to make the transition, and wise colleagues with on-line expertise shared tools and videos on-line (I made immediate use of the one that taught us how to use Zoom). We were like sponges then, soaking up new knowledge, new forms of communication, new ways to connect with our students. Over the next several weeks, one colleague wrote me that her students reported appreciating so much how consistently she had "checked in" with them. Another started writing long e-letters to her students, creating a unique back-and-forth chain that linked them together (“I am getting to know my students in a way that I otherwise would never have,” she reported). A third devised and shared with our list serve a distinctive “elephant in the room” assignment, whereby her students reflected on how the virus had impacted their lives. Still another began to knit her students masks. There was so much collegial good will and support. We all got it: that it was not about the teaching, but our lives: and how what was happening ‘out there’ was affecting us in the here and now.
But this time was not easy. For all the colleagues who seemed to be managing well, others seemed more fragile. One day, a teacher called me at home, and ended up sobbing for two hours on the phone. Sitting there in my living room, phone pressed to my ear, I could hear her gulping, trying to catch her breath. In person, we would have hugged. Now all I could do was listen, tethered as I was to my own two black boxes: the laptop and cell phone, through which my primary link with the world outside existed (beside that third scarier one: the television set with its prevailing anxious tone, its rising stats).
And then two good spirits entered my life. I will call the first L, a therapist who began a series of massive Zoom webinars, on resilience in a time of crisis. At first, I was a bit leery, because of her advocacy of pop culture icons. But by the end of that first session, I was drawn in. For one thing, L had this way of inserting little snippets of wisdom, nuggets that would stay with you after. When you’re scared, look for the helpers, she said. Notice more and judge less. And then: We try too hard to avoid the hard. So many of her words, simple as they seemed on the surface, struck me as true. I found myself looking forward to those late Thursday afternoons, when over a hundred of us would connect with her through Zoom. Taking her lessons to heart, I found I was watching myself more: sensing when a different zoom-room’s heat was starting to rise, when my leg would begin to thump nervously, when I would start muttering, when I found myself anxious—when I entered what L called “mud mind,” or “popcorn brain”—the clutter that kept us all left of center. Whenever that happened, I started practicing the three-breath exercise L had taught: the first simple slow in-and-out (simply noticing breath); the second observing the tensions in my body and then letting them go, the third breath where I paid attention to a single sense-detail in my immediate environment. Invariably, I would calm. Come home and be present, as L. would say. The beauty was that you could do the three breaths invisibly. No one else needed to know.
The second gift was J, another campus counselor. Earlier in the semester and in a more normal world, I had arranged for him do a faculty workshop, spottily attended but powerful, on “How to be well, when your students are not.” Now toward the end of spring term, I started wondering how I could channel both of these individuals, gifts from a crazy universe that had entered my life at just the right time. So with the support of my program administrator and our graduate assistant, we asked J. to offer an end-of-term session for our first-year writing teachers. J. called it “Teaching in the Pandemic: A Psychological Check-In with FYW Instructors,” and it seemed to be just what was needed. After we did what our program calls “pre-flective” writing at the outset, in response to the prompt of what we felt we had lost in this time, J. began to walk us through a two-hour Zoom’d session that felt oddly participatory. What are you feeling right now? he would ask, and voila! there would emerge a singular well of emotions listed to the right of our screens. What has it been like for you as an instructor? J would continue, and another list sprouted: hard, crazy, difficult…. And then: What has been lost, as a result of the pandemic? Friendship, closeness, people, time with students... By the time J got to the part where he named the problem, we were so ready to listen. We are surrounded by loss, J said. And then: With so much loss comes grief, and that this grief is hard. This is a time for us to practice compassion, he said: For you. For your students. For each other. Self-care is central in dealing with ambiguous grief.
Working that spring from my laptop, my cell phone, I ended up channeling both J and L into my teaching, my work. My grant-writing class held mostly seniors, and from a range of majors: professional writing, arts and humanities, forestry, fisheries and wildlife. I found myself wondering how a topic like grant writing might matter, in such a world, and to these students. What was the exigency? I asked, as we watched so many grant-funding agencies and philanthropic sources dry up before our eyes. A succession of guest speakers—writers from local agencies who took the time to Zoom with us-- seemed to help, as they acknowledged the problem, and proposed some solutions. One of the more amazing insights came from the guest speaker from the local refugee support center, who talked about how the refugees were paradoxically adjusting quite well to the coronavirus, because they had had prior experience dealing with trauma. Stories like these helped put our own struggles into perspective. It reminded us all of how lucky we were, or what our luck might be. I had a job, my students could “come to class.” L was always saying that: we are all in the same storm, but we are not necessarily in the same boat.
Teaching in the second half of the term, after the pandemic emerged, I always started class early, so that I could chat with the students who ‘came early’ to Zoom. I had also set up a number of long cell-phone or Zoom conferences—presumably to talk about their grants-in-progress, but actually to check in with my students about their lives, to make sure they were okay. These pre- and post-class conversations varied week to week, as I began to learn much about my students’ ways of life in the current crisis. One told me, for example, that he struggled with living alone, but had refused to go home, because (as a Fisheries and Wildlife major), he was committed to his collection of fish (“and fish are hard to move,” he said). Another student cried when she talked about the loss of a good family friend to the virus; still another had trouble keeping up with his schoolwork, now that he was employed additional hours every week, making and delivering food from a local restaurant, in an attempt to “help out family” (a parent now out of work). Several students were upset by the fact that the well-earned job they had worked so hard to get upon graduation had flat out disappeared. Two other students had lined up stints in Madagascar: one to study the gecko, the other for two years in the Peace Corps. Both opportunities had since disappeared.
And all of them, in one way or another, talked about how hard it was to focus in this extraordinary time.
So in one class, channeling both L and J, I tried something different, beginning with some questions-- What has this time been like for you? What has been the biggest challenge, academically or otherwise? What has gone well? (and why?)—and then giving them leave to write on whatever topic struck them as most important.
For several minutes, and then more, there was just the sound of clicking laptops, punctuated by an occasional dog bark, the rustle of movement. Very early in the virus-impacted world, I had asked my students to keep their mikes on, if possible, and even if they were ‘just writing,’ because I found I preferred those human sounds and even distractions—those indications of presence—to a silent screen of heads or names. After about a half hour, and based on a slight shift in the pecking sounds, my students seemed ready to share. When I asked them what it felt like, to have space to write about this, they said things like “new awarenesses,” inspires me”, “Love it – get things out!” “Therapeutic” – indeed, the very kinds of things I imagine my fellow documentarians are saying, in writing here. Then I talked with my students about how we are all living history right now, and how important it was to write and reflect in times of uncertainty. This was a time of grief, I said (channeling J): about all we had lost, and continued to lose, and how hard it was to accept this loss, when we did not know where or how the losses would end. Finally, I talked about the gifts they had been to me over the term, and I shared with them four lessons. First, I said, we are and can be resilient (and I pointed out how patient they had been with my earlier Zoom fumbling; how we had been managing the virus’s impact and the shift to on-line together). In turn, this led to Lesson 2: that two were better than one in both grant writing and in life (Find your helpers, L had said). Then that led to Lesson 3, that there were these moments of “shared lights” all round us—as long as we were open to them. I accompanied this last with a Zoom’d image of a candle, with flame. Yes, it was maybe corny, I thought, but then L would have been proud; she had taught that lesson well, of the wisdom to be found in the simplest image or phrase.
Standing there in my temporary, make-shift work-space at home—at the kitchen counter where my laptop rested on a toaster, at just the right height to allow me to stand, I found my shared light in my students, and in my colleagues, both from my department and beyond (those wise spirits J and L), who taught us how to weather this storm. And this in turn led to Lesson 4: that writing could help us hold time, hold where we were in the moment, give us pause. Writing helped us understand ourselves, to learn the difference between what we could change—and what we could not. In a world that felt like it was dissolving around us, writing helped us live.
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