The End of an Era

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.