This morning, I’m procrastinating grading the last ten papers of a bunch I should’ve had done a week (or more) ago. I decided this morning as I headed to the kitchen for my second cup of coffee that what I’m feeling on this last week of teaching at Dordt is sort of like what we call “senioritis.” I know the end is near, and so I’m having a hard time concentrating on what’s in front of me in preference for what lies ahead. Focus is a challenge.
What lies in front of me is a set of 43 seven-to-ten page papers to grade, then exams. My last day of active teaching is tomorrow. Lesson plans are done. I’ve saved the best part of the semester for last –the personal essay. I put this at the end partly to give my students a bit of a break in the middle of a season of final papers and exams and catching up. The personal essay requires no outside research, no in-text citations, no Works Cited page. It is intended to be a fun assignment, I explain. You can get confessional if you choose, but humor is acceptable also. Just write an experience of your life from your perspective. I read them a couple examples, so they know what they’re aiming for: not necessarily relatability, but relevance.
One main thing, I’ll explain tomorrow, is to be aware of your thought process as you’re writing, and to journal that process for us so that we see inside the experience to the meaning of it; to write so that we are changed somehow in our observation of whatever it is you’re writing about. I remind them that a personal essay doesn’t have to be “all about me.” If we’re blessed with sight, we go through life looking out through our two eyes. Our view of the world is outward rather than inward, and we should keep that in mind as we write a personal essay, I explain. It’s important to focus on the world outside yourself but to do it in a way that only you, the writer, can do from your perspective, to remember to explain what’s going on behind those two eyes observing the world. It’s not an easy assignment if it’s done well, but it should be far easier for them now (I hope) with the writing skills they’ve developed over the semester.
The most difficult part of the assignment, for many, is that I also require them to read their work aloud for the class during the last two class periods we’ll meet. Writing is a communal activity, I remind them. We’ve spent much of the semester approaching writing as communication, as conversation, and reading their work aloud is one way to continue that conversation. I want to give them the experience of sending their words out into an audience: their class, and seeing what comes back to them. They’ll exercise vulnerability in this, and hopefully, it’ll encourage them to include more of themselves in their writing, to show up to the page in a way they hadn’t before my class.
So, these are my last weeks of class, for now at least, what seems like the end of a long, unexpected journey from the first day I entered that same exact room as a returning student, nervous and hesitant, attempting to remedy a regret. Because I returned to the college I dropped out of in 1993 to finish and graduate in 2017, then to teach in 2019, I walk through the thin places between memory and dream and fulfillment of dreams almost daily. I’ll miss that experience. Part of me wants to tell that woman sitting down at the desk for fiction writing class, dropping her backpack next to her chair for the first time in 20 years that this is how the story ends. But then, I remember that not knowing what tomorrow brings, whether happy or tragic, is a gift also, and so is the reminder that in this moment, in this unfamiliar liminal space between academia and whatever life brings next, I can be sure of one thing: that my own story has an Author who I can trust, and that every day, I can continue walking through the dark days and the bright ones toward the eucatastrophe that waits at the end, when everything sad and wrong and evil will come untrue, and the end becomes just another new beginning into eternity.
Chapters like this one ending this month are what I keep in my pack as I walk on from here, reminders that I live as the beloved, and I can believe that the Author of the story does all things well.
