so, it's a long story but i've been teaching four classes for a few years now at my school and, generally, i always have 1 out of three classes where the room chemistry just isn't there. sometimes, during a particularly rough semester, two of the four are really stale. the students aren't meshing, the magic isn't there, it's not that the students aren't as bright or capable (they are!), but they just aren't coming to life in the way a really spectacular class does --- it's pulling teeth to get participation, or students aren't willing to ask questions, or they never really get very enthused. its very dry, which happens, but can be both taxing and disappointing because i've taught classes where my students and i have cried together reading Those Winter Sundays or where a class got entirely derailed because my students couldn't stop asking questions about Edgar Allan Poe's absurd fucking life or we laughed about, believe it or not, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.
anyways, I love my literature classes and statistically, i should've known that one day it would happen that all three of my literature classes would have bad class chem. three out of four -- a nightmarish majority. i also knew that this semester, i'd get saddled teaching college writing -- a class I generally hate teaching. And believe it or not, this semester, it is precisely the class i was least excited to teach that has proven to be my best class. The vibe is immaculate; the students are so wonderful to each other. And today, for the first time in six years, almost all my students stayed after class to keep writing after dismissal.
we were doing a free write exercise. i told them they had 25 minutes to just begin their term paper drafts however they wanted -- a bullet point, a run on sentence, a perfectly formatted paper, whatever, just write for 25 minutes and we'll dismiss early after because it's a friday.
and then, the early point came and went and they stayed seated. and then I told them when class officially ended and only three of the twenty people in the room left. so i just . . . blinked, and tried not comment on it, and thought: what the hell do i do now? so i stayed seated with them.
at one point, a student looked up from her journal and went "she put her coat on -- miss, are you leaving?" and i went "uh, well . . . do you not want me to? i mean, class is over" and they were like "why would we want you to leave?" and in the end, some students stayed for a full hour, a full sixty minutes, after class ended because they wanted to talk about their writing and workshop ideas with me. on a friday afternoon.
it was insane! insane!! and while i am so wiped out and i have many anxieties about my dissertation progress this semester and while my three lit classes being so dry make me feel like a terrible, awful, failure of a teacher, this writing class has been such a welcome surprise and such a reminder that i am so, so, so, so lucky to do this work.
