DP2 classes start tomorrow, and I’m meant to be planning,
but instead I’m sitting at my laptop, dream-writing about my students. I
started planning, I promise, but then I began thinking about who would be in my
classes and how to reach them, and I found myself grasping after graduated
students.
B will be gone, off to change the world in some highly
efficient way. M will be shooting his sardonic smile around a college campus,
driving the freshettes crazy. N & E left a whole year ago, so I can’t seek
their deeply reflective introspection in English or Psych. O is off with his
marvelous English accent and his more marvelous human perceptions. What about
T, who speaks so well, and tries so hard, but struggles to organize ideas in
writing? Long gone. How do I inspire the kid who always put her head down on
the desk? Ah, she’s graduated now. Can I bring J’s rhythmic curiosity and love
of everything alive into the curriculum? Nah, he wasn’t even a student at this
school—he’s from my last.
Where are my kids? I met up with some this summer, in coffee
shops and bumping into them on buses and failing that, on FB messenger. They
are so far away, so moved on into glorious humanhood. Just as I finally begin
to understand their complexity, they graduate, and I’m left behind, grieving
but proud, waiting for the desks to fill up again with new students of a new,
post-9/11, climate-change fearing, cellphone-addicted generation. I'm left behind, curious and pleased, watching them post their new campus plans and service projects, hearing from them as they keep pushing forward, ever striving towards their one wild and precious life.
Finally, by picturing the desks full of students, I remember
L, who will actually be here, who started out shy and ended up sharing, who
asked me for a list of feminist and minority writers on the first day of
school, whose name I’m still afraid to mispronounce. I sink into my
imagination, and build my DP2 class around her. They’ll return, a bit older, a
bit more confident, a bit more ready to tackle the assessments. And I will meet
them at the door, a bit older, a bit more confident, a bit more ready to tackle
the assessments. Time to start planning. 