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| One of the books my students and I discussed together; I took this picture because I liked the bookseller's reason for recommending Mrs. Dalloway: "Woolf elegantly demonstrates that sometimes life is bigger on the inside." |
“It is the end of an era,” my student
said a week ago. We were at my
neighborhood coffee shop with other students from my women’s literature class,
sitting around one of the coveted, large tables usually occupied by people with
laptops. My students had wanted the
class to gather somewhere off campus, and one suggested that coffee shop. That Wednesday, after their final exam, was
when most of them were available. So we sat there, eating biscotti or a
sandwich, sipping on tea or a latte, talking about books and movies and super
heroes (one of them was explaining The
Avengers to the rest of us). This
group of women had been chatting like this before, during, and after class
twice a week, and over the course of the semester, they had become a
community. A temporary community, by
definition.
I have thought about that a lot the past
couple of weeks, as I said goodbye to my classes and transitioned into the
summer. Every semester, I endeavor to
create a community in each classroom, one where students feel that they
belong. Each community develops its own
quirks, its own inside jokes. And even
as I create it, I know it will be dissolved and then never exist again.
This semester, I especially enjoyed my
students, thinking of them between class meetings and looking forward to our
next conversation. So I was sad as the
semester drew to a close, even though it meant the start of summer.
Yes, summer is nice: I slow down, I read
widely, I reacquaint myself with my art supplies and with the fiction I write
in the break from teaching, and I get my hands dirty in the garden, planting
tomatoes and annuals and tending to the perennials. But summer also involves letting go, saying
goodbye to students with whom I have spent a lot of time and for whom I feel
affection.
The endings feel more final at community
colleges. Students don’t meet again in
dorms, and many of them transfer to other colleges. So the connections they make in the classroom
are not easy to continue afterwards.
Despite that, connections are indeed made. Perhaps the connections were especially strong
this spring. Certainly the
end-of-semester rituals seemed more important, both to me and to the
students. In a composition class, some
students suggested we ought to have food on the last day and joked about a
turkey roast. We settled for Oreos, and
chips, and Hawaiian punch—which they drank out of Styrofoam bowls because no
one had thought of cups. Some students
from my Humanities class, where we study South Asia, decided to meet me at a nearby
South Indian restaurant. Over a
leisurely two-hour lunch, we sampled four different kinds of dosas and tried mutton biryani, too. Then they ordered kulfi; they were full, but they couldn’t pass up a chance to try an
Indian dessert.
At the coffee shop last week, getting
ready to leave, my student sighed as she said, “It’s the end of an era.” I chuckled inwardly at her grand description
of the disbanding of our small group.
But I also recognized the aptness of her words. It was indeed the end of our era, an era I enjoyed and will think of fondly, as I did while
planting tomatoes yesterday evening.
