The Emporia Gazette

May 28, 2012

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The end of the semester at my college always inclines me toward reflection, relief and mild melancholy. I suspect my students feel the same way, with more inclination, perhaps, toward relief. Five classes have met with me about 30 times each over the course of 15 weeks, five communities of individuals that materialize, coalesce and disperse in a few months.

Whatever its merits, I’ve never developed much enthusiasm for online learning. Its proponents contend that a community of learners can develop among students scattered by geography but connected by the Internet, and I’m not in a position to say they’re wrong.

In fact, my purpose isn’t to disparage online education. Along with the trend toward a part-time professoriate, the proliferation of online education is probably the most prominent tendency in higher education during the last decade.

Still, I prefer the face-to-face classroom, which seems to me to preserve a fine touch of humanity that warrants reflection during this week of final exams.

Who was in my classes this semester? Many are traditional students, fresh from high school and on their way to a four-year college or university, after a sojourn at my community college. Many are bright, capable and articulate. Others are shy and reserved. A few are sullen or downright surly. But they’re not always my most interesting students.

Consider the young woman who, a decade after high school, finds herself slogging through a developmental writing course before she can even attempt freshman composition. Pardon the cliche, but sometimes you do see a light go on in a student. She begins to listen to her instructor’s and classmates’ every word, to take notes and to think, to become absorbed in her writing, which over the course of the semester really does get better.

It doesn’t always work like that, by any means. Other students are taking my developmental writing class for the second or third time. I like them, but they miss too much class. Some of them have tattoos that betray their gangbanger history; some have been thieves and some have been in prison. And how well can you learn to write amid the violence and futility in the barrio?

Many of them say that’s all in the past now, and I believe them. Will they pass this semester? I’m not sure. If they don’t, what will become of them?

Momentous life passages occurred as the classes proceeded: At least two women in my five classes this semester were pregnant and one gave birth. Two students died. One young man, a veteran who had survived tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, was killed in the second week of the semester, hit by a car while out for his morning jog.

In mid-semester, a young woman in the same class lost control of her car on the way home from school and died in a one-vehicle rollover. When I told the class the next week that she wouldn’t be coming back, there were some tears. So we learned about more than just writing this semester.

A middle-aged woman expressed conservative religious beliefs then admitted that she spent two years in prison for marijuana possession. Several veterans can’t sleep at night and some of them drink too much. A young man came to class so depressed that I took him to one of the college’s counselors, and he never came back.

Another young man and a young woman sat on opposite sides of the class and never spoke up or spoke to anyone else. Then they began to sit together and talk to each other. A lot. Now I occasionally see them around the campus together. Does that happen in online classes?

In short, it’s all there, a rich mixture of human experiences in one ephemeral microcosm: birth, mating, sickness, death, frustration, laughter, storytelling, aspiration, failure and learning.

Good luck, students; the pleasure was mine.