Illustration by Naomi Ann Clarke
Considering my hopes for my college students at the beginning of a semester, I picture a race from elementary school, on Field Day. Maybe the 400-yard dash. The start is called, and some kids sprint toward the first turn, arms churning. Others start well and fade, but all do manage to finish, even a few disinterested participants in jeans and flannel shirts.
That’s the result I want for my students. I want each of them to earn their credits and move on, though I’m fully aware from Day One that, while some will maintain their interest through the term, others will run lukewarm or worse as the weeks pile up and the finish line somehow seems farther away.
Through the first nine weeks of the semester, a few years back, my student Olivia sat in the front row and expressed enthusiasm for every short story we read. Her hand was waving at least twice a class, and when called upon she contributed earnestly. Then I received an email from her dean saying that she had suffered a head injury and would be missing some time. Thereafter, I heard from Olivia infrequently. She informed me in terse updates that she would be missing another week. Then another. Finally she said she was going home to the Midwest and would be in touch when her doctor cleared her to do schoolwork again.
She never attended another class. At the end of the semester, I granted her request for a grade of “incomplete.”
Truthfully, I had low expectations. I thought the incomplete would never be resolved and I would eventually need to convert the “I” to an “F,” as I am too often compelled to do when, for instance, a student’s father falls gravely ill and the student leaves to take care of him.
But then Olivia contacted me midsummer. I sent her the assignment she had missed, still expecting she would fall once again out of touch. Instead, she got to work — emailing me a few times with questions — and submitted a solid paper. From there, we corresponded about the final exam. We arranged for her mother to sign off as a witness for a two-hour, at-home test. I found the experience very satisfying, knowing Olivia would return to campus soon, back on track. That I had done what I could to help.
One chilly fall morning, I turned in at the front entrance of campus and slowed down — initially startled and then feeling wary — as I spotted one of my first-year students, John, emerging from a gap in the trees. His expression was vacant, and he walked with deliberation along the tree line, drawing no nearer to my car. It worried me to imagine he had roughed it in the cold, underdressed, for hours. I went ahead with my day, noticing when John failed to attend class. A day or two later, an administrator emailed to inform me that John was withdrawing from school. Sad confirmation, in my eyes, that I’d witnessed him in some stage of a breakdown.
The question became, what next? Did John eventually recover enough to complete his undergraduate years? Was he institutionalized for a stretch? In most cases, I never learn more.
I once taught at a shelter for pregnant and parenting teens and also at an agency that trained unemployed adults in business skills. In the shelter, I taught a girl who had become pregnant at 16 by her co-worker at Dunkin’ Donuts. She told me, while clutching a stuffed animal in our GED class, that “it” happened behind the Dumpster in the store’s parking lot. She attended classes for about two weeks, and then I never saw her again. At the agency, I met a student in his 40s who held up a bottle of Pepsi after class and explained, without a trace of irony or lightness, that the subway trains did not run unless he was drinking Pepsi. After just a few days — taking my classes in typing and business math and so on — he was gone, well short of gaining new skills, well short of utilizing the agency’s help in seeking employment.
It may be inaccurate, but I contrast my college students like Olivia, and the support she received after returning home, with the people I met in the shelter and the agency. So many people, on the way down, seem to descend swiftly, with nothing to help them break their fall.
When I worked at the shelter, lunchtime felt like a release; I only wanted an escape from the clammy basement where I taught my GED classes, from the kitchen with its packets of grayish ground beef set out to thaw, from the living room where the shades were drawn and the only light emanated from the television, revealing young women wrapped in blankets and sprawled on low-slung couches.
Back then I had a sense that my stores of compassion were limited, and that the effort of teaching in the shelter was draining them. I might have assumed that such fatigue was universal among the staff, but my co-worker Linda showed me otherwise.
One blazing summer day, Linda and I had a hurried picnic a block from the shelter and then stopped to buy cold drinks at a convenience store. Walking back to work as fast as we could manage, we gave a wide berth to a large, shirtless man sitting on a crate. Just as we passed, he tipped forward and struck his head on the pavement.
If I’d been alone, I might simply have asked if he was OK or left him to ask for help, but that day I followed Linda’s instructions to “stay with him” while she went into the pizza place.
The man lifted his head, and blood dripped on the sidewalk. And there was Linda kneeling beside him, pressing napkins to his wound. She got me to help prop him up and told him that an ambulance had been called. She wasn’t bothered by being so close to him, by the split in his forehead, by his gut, by his smells of sourness and booze, but sat patiently beside him, one hand at the back of his head and the other stanching the bleeding.
I was itching to return to work. I worried about my class, about explaining my lateness to my boss. I wished Linda had left it to others to intervene instead. I further figured that if you get that drunk and sit in the sun, you’re going to keel over, to the surprise of absolutely no one. But Linda had no such judgment; she did not seem to find the man contemptible. She just saw someone who needed help, and she gave it.
Narratives of incompleteness abound in academic novels. After months of desultory effort, the title character in Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim fails to earn renewal of his teaching contract. (He observes, however, that “there were compensations for ceasing to be a lecturer, especially that of ceasing to lecture.”) In Jane Smiley’s Moo, freshman Sherri worries about flaming out in her very first term. Far from home, she sits “alone in the knowledge of how badly she was doing.” As midterms approach, she wonders “if they made you leave right away, or if they let you stagger around with your injuries until the end of the semester.”
These days, I frequently identify students like Sherri. Often they are evasive, filing out of the classroom without a glance in my direction. I remember that fear well. As a junior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, having dropped out from a previous school and thinking I might never go back to college, I sat on a couch nursing beers and listening to Joni Mitchell rather than attending class.
Eventually I emerged from that state, but sometimes I still feel myself pulled toward inaction. To this day I ask myself, Why, again, did I fail to complete my second novel? Yes, the manuscript has a beginning, a middle and an end, but I know well how unfinished it remains.
During one of my last days as a sophomore, while playing pool in the student lounge, I remembered that a professor had asked me to call her. I headed downstairs to a pay phone, planning simply to tell her my decision to leave school and thank her for her excellent philosophy courses, but she wanted to talk. She said she was concerned about me, that she sensed I wasn’t happy. She asked about my plans, and I couldn’t offer much, only that I would move to Chicago and find a job. But she didn’t make me feel foolish. She listed what she saw as my strengths and said she knew I would land on my feet, something I had trouble believing myself. Tears flooded my eyes and for some time just before the end of the call, I was unable to speak.
Maybe five years ago — whether as a result of raising kids and observing so intimately again the travails of adolescence, or because I’m more willing in middle age to loosen boundaries in some instances, or from a desire to be kinder to students who can be abrasive or sullen while sorting themselves out — I started to follow up with students who seemed troubled or who disappeared suddenly from class.
Introducing an assignment one day, I told my class a story about a former roommate of mine who worked in a convenience store in Harvard Square. One night a man came in, asked for cigarettes and flung money on the counter. The man’s disrespect in tossing bills my roommate’s way tapped into the abundant rage she always held at the ready, so she handed him the pack, opened the till, removed the change he was owed and threw it over his shoulder. Unfortunately, her manager was working the other register, and he fired my roommate on the spot.
The prompt I presented to my students was to tell their own story of the work world in one page. We discussed how they might provide context and add detail to their narratives. A week later, I returned their papers; they were ungraded, but I’d made comments. I could see Tina, a freshman, glowering at her paper, and when I turned to face the class, she stood beside her desk as if preparing to offer a formal recitation. “I don’t understand,” she said. “It was a good story, right?” I agreed that her anecdote of being mistreated as a server in a diner was a strong center for the assignment. “Then what’s the problem? Why all these comments?”
I was able to get Tina to agree to a meeting a few days later, which again turned contentious. Early in my career, I might have been uncomfortable at being challenged so vociferously and sought to cut the meeting short. But with Tina I was able to look past the angry surface. I saw how she was struggling. I also appreciated her honesty and her commitment to writing well.
As a sophomore, Tina chose a literature class of mine, but her participation ran hot and cold. Halfway into the semester, we had a guest speaker who struck me as engaging, but the discussion following her lecture fell flat. Tina generously came to my rescue. She warmed to the assigned text and to the lecturer’s questions, and she brought the rest of the class with her.
In retrospect, I think of that day as Tina’s grand finale, because I never saw her again.
We continue to correspond. I’ve followed her as she started at another school and then dropped out again, as she traveled and worked, as she moved back home to care for her mother. I’ve also followed others — a shifting cast of about half a dozen former students at a time — some once they left school, others after they limped through earning their degrees, through hospitalizations and rehab stays, through career changes and disastrous relationships — and through successes of all varieties and magnitudes, too.
The process of staying in touch with former students is rife with frustration. I’ll email someone, then try again months later, and never hear one word back. Even with those who keep up more closely, connections can be sporadic. Lately, my correspondence with Tina has lapsed, which gives me a familiar, dissatisfied sensation. I feel it even more sharply this time since I’m the cause of the disconnect, having become completely absorbed in teaching and committee work.
Now, with more free time between terms, I need to convert intention into action, to resist incompletion once again. For Tina’s sake — and for my own.
Stephen K. Bauer is a teacher and writer in Belmont, Massachusetts.