Occasionally something happens that reminds me of how my students see me. These moments can be very jarring, like seeing your own face in a photograph, mouth open and laughing, or finding an old audio recording of your voice, scratchy and youthful. Sometimes they're funny, as when, this summer, two students were thrown into a panic when I said, "I have something special for you today in class." They'd assumed "something special" was an extra reading, or a quiz.
It was cupcakes.
These moments can also be humbling. A straight cismale student of mine who was Muslim and South Indian American once sent me a lovely thank you note after our course ended. "I was nervous at first in your class," he wrote. "I did not know how it would be to study with you, because I was not sure there was space for a regular guy in your theories." He had been taught to believe something about women like me, that I would be shrill and unyielding, that I would be cold, that I would dismiss him. These notions about feminism follow us everywhere we go, but most students do not have the courage to admit to them. I was touched.
This month I received a different kind of note. It came in my email, in response to a detailed explanation of the academic requirements for my Sociology of Education class.
Thank you for your forewarning about this class, professor. As a "hybrid" member of the real world as well as a college student, I am not able to commit such time to things like this. I clearly need a class with much less commitment as I am really just trying to obtain a good grade.
He went on to request my "patience" in awaiting the revised roster; he'd already dropped the class. I stared at the email a while. It nagged at me.
Such time.
Things like this.
Obtain a good grade.
As an undergraduate, I often worked twenty or thirty hours a week. I attended the most expensive college in America, where a thousand dollars in books each semester was not unheard of. I often read entire books perched at the library reserves; all of The Communist Manifesto, all of The Prince. My parents helped to pay for my schooling, and (generous) grants and (ominous) loans covered the rest, but I didn't have a meal plan, or transportation, or money for clothes and makeup and the cheap beers we bought on the weekends. If I got an internship in the city, I put my train fare for the week into a separate wallet so I wouldn't spend it. I never had any money in the bank. This year will mark ten years since I graduated, and my job paid barely $100 a week.
Was I a "hybrid" member of the real world? I didn't think of myself that way. I just thought of myself as a college student. I thought I was lucky. I was. My privilege, so invisible to me then, is marked in all of my memories of that time.
I worry for my students, students who stay up until the wee hours writing for my classes after coming home from full shifts of bartending. I worry about the ones who must drive back to campus late at night after a full day of school and another full day of work. "Don't fall asleep at the wheel!" I say to them in emails, fretful and impotent. "It is not worth that. Don't worry about the homework."
And yet what of spending "such time" on "things like this?" What does my syllabus, my classroom, say about my position in the world? What does it say of my beliefs about education? Where is the space for the working students? Do I do them a disservice by demanding "things like this," or am I obligated to help them -- force them -- to make "such time?" If not now, when? What is this time for, if not for "things like this?"
In the righteous indignation of my student's note, I see myself reflected. It nags at me because the mirror he holds has caught something real about me. I lament the receding importance of the liberal arts. I insist upon proper semicolon usage and read poems out loud. I have been known, I am chagrined to admit, to laughingly tell a classroom of students, "we live in two different worlds, and the difference is that mine has daily newspapers."
For the most part, they think I am charming and benign, a little whimsical, a paradox of old-fashioned practices and new-fangled theories, but they also think that I do not know how the real world works. No matter how well I lead them through conflict theory and social reproduction, they think that these are only theories to me. They have been taught to believe something about women like me, about the knowledge we peddle, about how deeply ensconced we are in our ivory towers. They have been fed the neoliberalism of Fox News and Teach for America, and they believe that women like me are becoming dinosaurs, that we are out of touch with reality, that the very earth will shift below us and we will not look up from publish/perish to see what the fuss is about.
I pray that they're wrong.
Sometimes it cuts a little close.
I will not change "things like this," though. I still believe in those things, those awful, exhausting, confounding things. I still believe in school.
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