14 Weeks
Dispatches from a professor in the middle of the semester
From September through April, and usually even longer, I count my life in weeks, from one to fourteen, and then starting over in January at one again. I am a community college professor, I am professionally and perpetually at the whims of the school schedule. Each new semester a chance to start over, each end of the semester a chance to close any doors that may need closing.
In particularly busy semesters, of which this is one, or with particularly bad schedules (the ones that force me to regularly see the sunrise), the 14 weeks is a comforting span of time. You can do anything for fourteen weeks. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. By week 14 it feels longer, as I look back at a to do list with discarded items that just never got done. All semester.
In September, week 1 is always unseasonably warm, as I try to figure out what my first day of school outfit is. Later on in the semester, my outfits will get markedly worse, as I roll out of bed a little later and have to figure out what pants go well with snow boots. But I try to start my fashion game off strong. I try to start a lot of things off strong. By day one, I have always spent the week checking my attendance list, looking at the names. I have been doing this for over a decade; I am still excited.
I have no scientific evidence for this, and I may look back from the beginning of the next 14 week cycle and not know what I was talking about, but the best weeks are the 2nd and 3rd. And I know, that’s a little early to peak. The first week is always a let down, it’s a speech I could make in my sleep at this point, and I’m always more excited than they are (though to be fair, that remains true for the duration). By Week 2, they’ve come to terms with the fact that I will be forcing them to speak, that while mine is not a class they chose, there’s something amusing happening at the front of the room, and they could maybe, even, learn something.
In weeks 2 and 3, I wander around the classroom trying to suppress a smile as I see students talking to each other, working almost too earnestly to determine “what stood out” to them about a reading, or to make a list of all of the different things they read on a given day. I make note of who’s earnestly annotating a text, and who’s less than earnestly playing a video game on their laptop, interrupting them with a tap of my fingers on the desk. So far I’m not frustrated, not this early.
In those first weeks, before assignments start rolling in, and students start fading away, only to appear weeks later with a hastily dashed off request to somehow complete a semester’s worth of work in a week, it feels like I am doing what, since I was 18, I have wanted to do. It feels like I am teaching. And it feels like, in a world where my students strain under the weight of heavy course loads, of adjusting to new countries, of working full time jobs, and caregiving and so much more, that teaching matters. That what’s happening in my classroom matters.
There’s an argument to be made (and they do make it, I’m sure, at least in their heads) that it doesn’t. It is an argument that grates against me sometimes in the depth of winter, as I weigh what to sacrifice to allow students to scrape through, as I try not to think about the material consequences for them if I don’t, as I try to decide what kind of professor I want to be. How much did that essay matter when you’re struggling to pay rent? How much was that quiz worth when your study permit is on the line? In my darkest moments, I think of the title of the Noor Hindi poem “Fuck Your Lecture On Craft, My People Are Dying”. It is an indictment, and a truth, and a mandate, I think. If we’re doing this, it better be worth something, it better be real.
But in the early weeks of the semester, it feels like I am arming them for that world. That my lectures on how to read, how to think through why something was written, who it was for, that it will allow them not to be tricked. I imagine them scrolling through reddit, hovering over a particularly noxious conspiracy theory and moving on. I imagine them finding an author that reflects back to them something they never thought they’d see on the page, or winning an argument, or penning the email that gets them a job and protects them from being judged for their grammar. This may be too grandiose a vision. But an already-tired teacher can dream.
When I was a younger teacher, a volunteer in an ESL classroom motivated by sheer desire to help, I used to stubbornly, desperately believe, that I could catch them all. That every single student would learn from me, that that learning would carry with them. That that learning would help. I had grown up in the days of the “No Child Left Behind” education act, a pretty horrendous piece of legislation, but an expression that still rung in my head. My students weren’t children, but I would be leaving none of them behind.
It is different now, for better or worse. I am different now. And what I am teaching is different now, as I arm them not with the words they’ll need at the supermarket, or at the doctor’s office. But the ideas they’ll need to navigate the world, the essay structures they’ll need to navigate college, the readings that hopefully, hopefully, will make them want more. And I know I will leave some of them behind. Some who will want to be left behind, some who will wish they could have caught up but life will get in the way, maybe even some who I will fail to reach, who I will let down.
I am writing this from the end of Week 5, as I stare down the middle of the semester, wondering where the time went, and as the one’s being left behind are starting to emerge, in the form of empty seats in the classroom. I am less forgiving now as I tap my fingers on the desk of the video game players. I am slightly more curt in email responses. I am trying to hold onto the hope from the first day of school. I am trying to remember the ones I am reaching.
Because I know that every 14 weeks, there will be a few that I don’t leave behind, that find something they were looking for in my classes. Who read an article that makes them feel seen, or find confidence in their writing that they didn’t know they had. It’s a different barometer now, but it’s still something. And in 14 weeks I get to try again, and that’s something too.
Not me crying at the end! 😭