Back at it

I taught in a classroom for the first time in seventeen months this week, the longest stretch I've experienced professionally sans students, including my sabbatical, since I started teaching in 1988. These first classes have been...tough, for students and for teachers alike. My university has sensibly mandated vaccines for all students and faculty members as well as mask-wearing in all buildings, and HEPA air filters have been installed in each classroom. Grateful as I am to my university's proactive concerns for its employees and students—"Protect the pack" is the phrase the school has adapted—the industrial-grade filters are very loud, even when set on low, and masked students are having great difficulty hearing me and each other. (The typical late-August heat and stuffiness in the rooms don't help matters.) Shy and softer-speaking students are adrift. Hearing-impaired students, already at a disadvantage unable to read masked lips, are now doubly blocked-out of discussions, which is unacceptable. My struggles teaching compare palely to those who are enduring work in hospitals, or long shifts in stores, factories, or in customer service suffer, let alone teachers facing all-day schedules K through 12, yet writ small the classroom reflects the vast difficulties that we're all enduring in the pandemic. My students and I did, and are doing, our best—as is the university—but the situation's rough. Perhaps a renewed, and renewing, sense of empathy might come as a result of all this.

Though teaching remotely has its considerable advantages, it's been great to get in front of students again, to vibe off off the collective energy, muted though it is, of a group of people eager to hang with each other and to think, talk, and write. I began my Creative Nonfiction 1 workshop by imitating a cluster that I'd produced earlier, to help the students generate material for subject matter. In my exercise, I'd found myself taking a detour from a subject that I'd hoped to explore toward something unexpected, different yet revealing, and hopefully more valuable in the long run. Here's hoping that this difficult semester takes an equally surprising turn for the better.

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I enjoyed some measure of normalcy a couple weeks ago during a brief solo cross-country drive to visit my parents and few close buddies, who I hadn't seen since 2019. On the way east I caught a Clippers game in Columbus, Ohio, on the way back a Mud Hens game in Toledo. Few in attendance were masked, and I tried to keep my distance, yet being outdoors, drinking a beer, enjoying a slice, watching competitive baseball, did wonders for my general psyche. Viva Minor League Baseball. Viva science. We'll get through this. 

Fifth Third Field, Toledo, Ohio

"Knothole Gang," Toledo

Huntington Park, Columbus, Ohio

Huntington Park, Columbus, Ohio

Photo of Reavis Hall via Northern Illinois University