Measuring Their Love

If I could, I would continuously poll my students throughout the semester. I would poll them about all sorts of stuff, like what they thought about that time I wore jeans to class, or how much they liked my new haircut, or how charming they thought I was during my lecture on paraphrasing.

But the most important question I could ever ask is this one: Do you love me?

I want my students to love me. I think my obsession with winning and keeping their affection goes back to the first semester I ever taught. There were fourteen of us TAs in one office that semester, and people were constantly comparing their classes. Two of the girls would consistently slink back from teaching looking like they'd just come back from war. "My students hate me," they would moan. "It's just so clear--they loathe me."

That's when I would smile and shrug and tell them it would get better eventually.

"Do your students like you?" they asked.

"My students love me," I chirped. I was very, very annoying. And I was very, very annoying because I was trying to prove myself to everyone around me. After all, I came in at twenty-one years old, and I spent a lot of time before my first day worrying my students would sense my young-ness, my inexperience, my fear, and there would be a bloody coup, and they would hang me upside-down from the chalkboard. When none of that happened, I was so happy and so relieved that I couldn't stop talking about how they loved me. They loved me. Some loved me too much.

But ever since then, I've wanted every single class to love me the same way. I want my students to look forward to coming to my class because--let's face it--when they are happy with the course and the teacher they are more attentive and less likely to fall asleep in a puddle of their own drool. They might actually learn something.

Sometimes it's hard to measure a class's love. Sometimes you wonder if there's a thin line between loving a professor and wanting them to explode in a firey ball of death as they're talking about the proper use of apostrophes. Sometimes you look into your students' eyes and think, They're totally fantasizing about killing me right now. Of course, there are other times when you look into your students' eyes and think, They're totally fantasizing about me right now. Sometimes it's hard to tell which of those options is the better one.

Still, there are other times when you know exactly what a class feels. This week was one of those times. The class schedule for next semester is out, and students are registering. This means I can now pop open a tentative class list and see who is enrolled in my courses. I did that the other day, excited to see the photo list of my new students. As the pictures loaded, familiar faces began to pop up. Not one familiar face, not two familiar faces, not three familiar faces. At least ten. Ten familiar faces in one class. I went to my next course. Same thing. Many, many familiar faces popped up. I had repeat students. Tons of them.

The next day I showed up to class and one of my students--a boy who never fails to sit in the front row, a boy who refers to me as Miss Jess, a boy who surely must have a raging (albeit charming) case of ADHD--cleared his throat.

"Miss Jess?" he said. "Miss Jess, I really want to be in your class next semester, but that means I'd have to move my chemistry lab section, and the only other one available meets at 7 AM."

"That sucks," I said. I figured this was his apology to me, that he was trying to explain why I wasn't going to see him in next semester's class.

"But I think I'm going to do it," he said. "It's going to be hell, but I think I'm going to do it."

That is pretty much the biggest declaration of love you can get from a student, and I spent the rest of the day wallowing in that flattery.