So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Good Night

This weekend I baked somewhere around 250 cookies to celebrate the end of the semester, which was today. I made chocolate chip cookies and sandwiched them together with vanilla frosting, and I also made a double chocolate cookie recipe my college roommate somehow managed to steal from our favorite bakery in Fredonia. I turned out sheet after sheet after sheet after sheet of these cookies until they overflowed from the containers I was trying to store them in.

Today I lugged those cookies up three flights of stairs to my office, where they then sat until one of my students--one of my most-loved engineer boys--happened by my office and slumped into one of the crusty chairs the powers that be stuffed into our office in hopes that student visitors wouldn't mind sitting on something that looked like it'd been peed on by the entire population of the Whispering Pines Assisted Living Community.

This student didn't mind at all. "Hey," he said. He sounded tired, beat-down, half-dead.

"Hi there," I said.

"Can I just tell you about my weekend?" he asked, and I said of course. So he did. He told everything that happened since the time I'd seen him last. And it was a lot of stuff. The kid was having a rough week, and--more importantly--a rough semester.

When he finished listing all the things that went wrong, the student took a deep breath and slumped against the back wall. He looked like he was two seconds away from imploding. And if that happened, the only evidence that he had ever been in my office would've been a soggy Sabres hat perched above the pee stained chair.

I felt I needed to lift his spirits somehow. "Here," I said. I unwrapped the first package of cookies. "Have one. No, have two."

He took two. He stuffed them into his mouth. "I need help with my Works Cited page," he said, and he looked so sad and so tired that I nodded and peeled back the wrapping on the second package of cookies.

"Okay," I said. "And here, have another."

By the time he'd left my office, that student had eaten somewhere near six or eight cookies. I felt very proud of myself, very much like I was on the right track to becoming the type of mother and grandmother I want to be: the type who takes one look at her children and grandchildren when they step in the door and says, "You look skinny. Come into the kitchen. I'm making you a pie."

Later, this student and my other favorite engineering students sat in the hallway outside of our classroom shoving those cookies in their faces and eating half the pan before any of the other students even got there. But I didn't stop them. "Go, go," I said, because, really, I'd made those cookies for them. I'd made them so I could do one last thing for them, so I could extend one last gesture, one last Let me take care of you, okay, boys? We took good care of each other for thirty weeks. And there was nothing I loved better these last two semesters than having those boys around me all the time, having them around to say, We love you, Jess! and What are you going to do without us, Jess?

The truth is, I don't know. Mourn, probably. Mope. Kick around the campus and wonder what they're doing now, how they're doing in physics, how much they're eating, if they're getting enough sleep, if they need more cookies in their diets. But at least today I could contribute.

And at least I know I haven't seen the last of them.

"We looked up your fall schedule online," one of them admitted to me this week. "We wanted to see when and where you were going to be around. You know we're going to come by all the time."

And I thought, Thank God.

Best. Day. Ever.

I'll tell you this: it hasn't been easy lately. I'm starting to come to grips with the fact that I am not going to land any of the fifty full-time teaching gigs I applied for this year. I'm starting to realize that, for better or worse, I am probably going to be in Buffalo for another year. Still, I remain thankful for what I've been given: more time with my family and oldest friends.

But it's been hard. It's been hard to go to the mailbox every single day and see more rejection letters from colleges that stretch from New Hampshire to Oregon. We don't want you, they say. Are you kidding, they say. Better luck next year, they say.

It's been a similarly taxing battle for publication lately. My stories--even the one I love and believe in more than anything--have bounced back to me. Rejections have sprinkled in from all my favorite literary magazines. Not right, they say. We loved almost all of it, they say. Try us again, they say.

My mailbox has been stuffed full of no, no, no, no, no. It's been like this for months. And it was starting to grate on my insides, scrub me raw.

But then this morning I woke up in a beautiful mood. There was some song on the radio--some song I'd never heard before--and it was just the right song to wake up to. I wanted to sing in the shower. I wanted to pull out some of my best dance moves as I was pouring cereal. I wanted to splash through leftover puddles on my walk into school this morning. Everything felt good.

It was just one of those days, filled with these and other beautiful things:

1. I got a standing ovation in my last class of the afternoon.

2. My boy Blake--my favorite American Idol contestant, the boy who, yesterday, inspired me to shriek (in front of my father nonetheless) I want to bite his stomach!--was sent safely back to the couch and Sanjaya was kicked off the show. Later, Katy would call me to declare victory and say, "The world is now right!" and yes, yes, I had to agree. It was. Now I will no longer have to worry about writing her a five paragraph rant on Wednesday mornings that discusses how much I am bothered by Sangina, which is what I took to calling him weeks ago. (When I said Sangina in front of my mother, she turned to me and said, very seriously, "Jess, that's not his name." And I had to say, "I know, mother. I'm combining words here." And there was a pause and a smile as it slowly dawned on her. "Oh," she said. "Ohhhhh. I like it!")

3. The Sabres won Game Four. Let's take a moment to meditate on the beauty of this statement.

4. And here's the crowning moment of it all: all the ugly no-no-no was finally replaced by one yes--a yes that made me drive to the liquor store in search of a bottle of champagne because why shouldn't one celebrate success on a Wednesday night? One of my stories was just picked up by the Berkeley Fiction Review. The edition should be out in a few weeks.

Anticipating the Separation Anxiety

There are two weeks left. Two tiny, eensy, infinitesimal weeks left before the spring semester is over. There is a part of me that is saying yesss and halleluiah and bring me a mojito! but that part is seriously being dwarfed by the fact that in two weeks I will no longer take the elevator up to the top floor of the English building and walk into the room that's made of windows-windows-windows to see the beaming faces of all my best and favorite boys.

There are ten best and favorite boys (and, actually, one girl). They are engineering students. They are going to grow up to build important things. They are going to keep our world turning. But before they do that, they are going to make it through two sections of English Composition (regular and advanced) and they are going to do it with me. They enjoyed my class so much last semester that they swarmed my open sections for this semester and, even though they hate writing and English, and even though they think it's terribly pointless for boys like themselves, they have spent the last thirteen weeks of class (and the fifteen weeks of fall semester, too) listening to me, getting better, trying to impress me, tossing papers at me with confidence. "That's the best paper I've ever written," they'll say, or, "You're going to love this." And they're right. It is and I do. They are trying so hard, and I love them for it.

These best boys have done a lot of things for me. They've brought me peanut butter pie, Oreos, and ice cream. They've written me notes of love. They've even gone so far as to orchestrate it so their laptops blast bass-thumping arena rock-type songs when I enter the classroom, which makes me feel like I'm some sort of badass superhero teacher.

It's things like this that make me adore them, and I adore them in a way that is unyielding, hard, unshakable. Part of me wants to scoop them all up and move them into my basement so that they are available whenever I get the itch to be amused. Part of me wants to tell them that when they've all successfully turned twenty-one, I am going to take them to the bar and buy them rounds and rounds of shots. Part of me just wants to stop time so I can go on with them in my class forever.

After this semester, they are done with English. They will have successfully killed their general education requirements, and they will be off to save the world with their chemical-mechanical-aerospace engineering skills. I will miss them terribly. So, so terribly.

I'm dreading the last day. I'm dreading the handing out of cookies (they asked, they begged, they looked at me with big big big eyes and said, Can't you make us cookies again? Like last semester? They were soooo good.) and the inevitable goodbye, which is going to be as difficult as saying goodbye to my first-ever class. It will be so much the same. It will be me looking at these boys--my best, best boys--and thinking, You have changed me, you have made me a better teacher, you have taught me about myself. I will never be the same again.

And it will be completely true.

One More Thing About the Students

I need to face facts: I have strange dreams. I've had dreams about celebrities (Mary-Kate and Ashley Olson eating giant bricks of Swiss cheese), dreams about non-celebrity celebrities (Kevin Federline whittling me a chair from a large hunk of wood and presenting it to me as a gift, after which I exclaim, "NO, KEVIN FEDERLINE! YOU CANNOT BUY MY LOVE WITH A CHAIR!"), dreams where I'm a lesbian (with girls from grade school, with my best friend, with complete strangers), dreams where I'm pregnant (and my dad corners the father in the produce section of a local grocery store and lectures him until I run to the freezer section to cry), dreams where I'm naked with a boy (my grandparents are watching and waving), and dreams about Minnesota people (Diana saying, "Sure, I'll go to the bar with you. Come over and get me. Give me five minutes. Oh, and don't mind the giant box of sex toys that's on my couch!").

That's why it shouldn't seem strange to me when I have more of these strange dreams. Even when it's the subset of dreams that involves students, past and present. That's not new. When I was in Minnesota, I was dreaming about students all the time. But this past weekend I woke up one morning and blinked hard at the things that were still hanging in that misty just-out-of-reach dream space in my brain. I could still see things from the dream, but I didn't understand them, and I didn't understand how I transitioned into that part of the dream.

What I saw was this: one of my students from this semester, a student I don't find all that good-looking (although I did admit to myself during conferences this past week that he's got good hair, nice jeans, and an artsy air that some girls would love). My student was wearing an outfit I saw on a student in an undergraduate poetry workshop I got to sit in on when I was down in Fredonia this week for a poetry reading by Lucille Clifton.

This is what the student did: he collapsed onto a bed, and I hesitantly came down next to him. "I'm not allowed to do things like this," he told me. In my dream, this student was super religious.

"You're just on a bed," I said.

"I'm on a bed with a girl," he corrected.

"And you're probably not supposed to do this either, huh?" I asked, and proceeded to raise one of his knees so I could sneak one of my knees between his, so I could make a knee sandwich.

"No," he said. "I'm definitely not supposed to touch knees with a girl."

And then I woke up.

I blame this on student conferences. I totally do.

Student Gems, Continued.

(1.)

Male Student #1: So, what you're telling me is... I need to un-vague this?

Me: Yes, un-vague it. Un-vague it a lot.


(2.)

Male Student #2: Can I ask you a question?

Me: Yes.

Male Student #2: Did you make up the word rebuttal?

Me: Uhm, no.

Male Student #2: Really? Huh.

Gems from Student Conferences, Day One

(1)

Student: Why did you mark this? What's wrong with this?

Me: Are you asking me why I marked the eventhough on your paper?

Student: Yes.

Me: Even though is two words.

Student: No, it's not.

Me: Yes, it is.

Student: You're kidding me.

Me: Nope.

[A few beats later] Student: I got As in high school English, you know.


(2)

Me: So what do you want to say about this paper?

Student: Well, for starters, it was juvenile.

Me: You mean the way you wrote it was juvenile?

Student: No. The assignment was.

Back to an Old Place

Well, I thought to myself, that sure looks familiar.

This was yesterday, when I was killing time in between two of my classes. I was sitting upstairs in a lounge with broke-down couches. I was leafing through the papers I'd just gotten from my students when two of them slumped down onto the couch across from me. "Hi!" they said, and they smiled.

One of the students was a boy, the other was a girl. The boy is the type that qualifies as Really Attractive--a little on the short side, but otherwise brilliant. His skin is tan, the power of his smile could be measured in wattage, his eyes are the type of blue that guarantees he will often get laid even if he has no other redeeming qualities than those eyes. The girl is short and spunky. She's always willing to participate. She always says goodbye and have a nice day to me as she leaves the classroom. Her hair is jet-black, her lips are always perfectly glossed.

This girl and her other beautiful short friends are in love with this boy. They surround him in class. They are always giggling and batting their eyes and tossing their hair and finding reasons to touch him on the shoulder, on the arm, on the thin bones of his hand. No one finds more reasons to touch him than the girl with the jet-black hair.

When they spread themselves out across the couch yesterday I pretended it was no big deal, that I could care less that they were sitting across from me. I went on looking at the papers. I pretended I wasn't eavesdropping.

I was completely eavesdropping.

She asked him if he was going to come out to the bar with them later that night.

"Maybe," he said. He didn't look at her straight on.

"Oh come," she said. "It's going to be fun."

"We'll see," he said. Then he made a phone call. Someone was waiting for him in the union. They had homework to copy. He said he'd be over soon.

That was when the girl tipped her body closer to his. She leaned in. Her posture was screaming Stay! Stay! Stay!

They talked for a few more minutes. They laughed and swatted at each other. When he smiled at her the light from his perfect, perfect smile was unbearable. I knew exactly where this was headed.

Finally, he started to gather his things.

"You're going?" she asked.

"I've got to," he said. Then they sat there for a minute, just looking at each other. In complete silence. She smiled, but it wasn't so much a smile as it was a thin line cutting across her face. He reached over and touched her cheek with the back of his hand. Her body swelled. You could actually see it. Her entire self bloomed. He was touching her. My God, he was touching her like that. But then he rose, and her body deflated, collapsed in on itself. "See you later," he said.

She watched him leave, watched him walk down the hall and far away from her. He never looked back.

When he rounded the corner toward the elevator, the girl slouched over. She put her head in a pillow of her hair and hands. I thought maybe she was going to cry. I wanted to put my folders and notebooks away and go sit next to her on the couch. I wanted to gather her up--all that jet-black hair and loose, broken limbs--and hug her, tell her it was okay, he was gone, she should just cry, get it out, get it over with. I imagined what I could tell her. "I've done this before," I would say. "I know it feels like your heart is too big for your chest right now. I know you think it's possible you could die from this feeling, from loving him too much, from him not loving you enough or at all." I felt for her.

What I was feeling most wasn't understanding or sympathy, although they were certainly there. I wasn't thinking, You poor thing. Just cut and run, and do it quickly. No. What I was thinking and feeling as I sat there watching her finally sit up and lean backward, close her eyes, and pretend to sleep--which is infinitely better than crying in front of your English teacher--well, what was going on inside of me was much more complicated, much darker than all that. I was thinking, I'd give anything to go back--to even the worst times, the times where I cried in my car, in bar bathrooms, on my own bathroom floor--just so I could love a person that way again.

While I watched her breathe and try to keep the tears locked behind screwed-shut eyelids, I thought about two Septembers ago, a day I drove up to the place the Wily Republican had moved to after he graduated. He and I had lain on his bed and looked at each other for a long time. Things were said, I'm sure, but I don't remember them. We were holding hands in that way you hold hands in high school: fingers twisted into fingers. Later, we watched television and sat on separate couches. When I went to leave, he walked me to my car. We both stood in front of the driver's side door.

"Thanks for coming," he said.

"Sure," I said, like it was no big thing, when in reality I'd spent an hour picking an outfit, gotten a haircut, and arranged my day around the drive up to his place. He'd moved in the middle of that summer. I'd helped him pack boxes and load his car. I'd folded and stacked clothes. I'd searched for the lids to his grungy Tupperware. I'd waved goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. For the rest of that hot Minnesota summer I sat on the edge of the local pond and repeated song lyrics in my head. I'm wishing my summer away just to see you again, I sang. And I did. I wished my way into July and August and straight into September.

The moon was rising over his shoulder. The night was quiet. I could hear only two things: my heartbeat and the hum of the distant highway traffic. It was an important moment, although I shouldn't have known that then. I shouldn't have known that a few weeks later the Wily Republican would call me up, say he had something to tell me. A terrible, awful something. But somehow I did know.

I wanted to stall. I wanted to keep him outside forever. I wanted him to say, "Let's sit in the car for a little bit." I wanted him to say, "Stay the night, okay?"

I would've. I would've stayed the night, the week, the month, the year. At that one moment in time I would've dropped out of school and left everything behind if he'd just asked me to.

But he didn't. Instead, he picked me up in his arms. I balanced on my toes and he hugged me. He crushed me underneath the weight of his arms, and we stayed like that while the traffic continued to hum, while the moon slid in and out of a veil of clouds. His hand was moving slowly against my shoulder blade. He drew circles against my skin. "Goodbye," he said. "Drive safe."

Then he let me go, let me down. He backed away from me. He waved. Then he turned around and walked away. I eased into my car and turned the key. I watched him go. He never looked back. Several weeks later he called, told me about this girl he'd met, how he was going to give it a go. I could still feel the circles he'd drawn on my freckled shoulder blade. They burned while I cried and cried and he said, "I didn't mean to do this. I really didn't."

But he did. And so did I. And my students were doing it, too. I could see it clear as day. I could see my own face in hers, the Wily's in the boy's. I saw us looking at each other and smiling and running around town and laughing and letting the snow fall down onto us.

And I could've whispered, "I know what you're going through, so let me give you some advice..." and then told her to stop answering his calls, to sit on the other side of the room during class, to tell him she was busy and couldn't see him right now. But I didn't want. I knew it was too important that she go on loving him and that he go on doing what he was doing. I knew there were too many lessons she had to learn about love and what it should be and--more importantly--what it shouldn't be.

Yesterday

Yesterday was the first day of the spring semester. I met all three of my new advanced writing classes, one of which is loaded down with students from last semester's all-engineer composition class. They're all boys--darling, darling boys who constantly grumbled about writing but liked me and the way I organized class enough to come back for more torture.

When I stepped off the elevator yesterday they were lounging in the lobby area, spreading themselves over couches and chairs.

It was wonderful to see them. I felt like it was one of those important dramatic moments in a musical--a moment when music would swell up from the pit, heavy on the trumpets and tubas.

"Helloooo, boys," I said.

They all broke into smile. Big goofy boy smiles. "Helloooo, Jess," they said. Then they all started talking at once. They talked about their other classes and teachers, about the hot girl they were going to miss from last year's class, about their girlfriends, about how they hate World Civ and Chemistry and Calculus.

I wanted to put them in my pocket and carry them around for the rest of the day, so I could pull them out at random and make them amuse me. They made me feel like this is going to be a pretty badass semester. I can't tell you how happy that makes me.

Last Day Sweetness

Halleluiah, the semester is over.

All the portfolios are in, all the papers are graded, and all the excuses are done (I know I haven't handed in a research paper, even though it was due last Tuesday, but, uhm, I'm pledging this fraternity... and, uhm, well, they don't let us do homework).

All I have left to do is pour myself a glass of wine, crank up Cat Stevens, and tabulate some grades. This is a fine day. A fine day that was made even finer by the following sweet student moments:

(1)

One of my students helped me carry the thick stack of in-class journals and final portfolios up to my office. Then he sat with me for forty-five minutes, just talking until I had to go to my last class of the day and he had to go take his World Civilization final.

"Shouldn't you be studying?" I asked him. Downstairs, half of his class was still in our classroom. After I forced them to do class evaluations and eat cookies I'd baked, they'd formed a circle and started quizzing each other on ancient civilizations. "Don't you want to be in on that study group down there?" I asked.

My student--sweet, sweet boy that he is--shrugged. "Nah," he said. "I think I'll just stay here." Then he paused. "Did I ever tell you that I showed my mom the first paper I wrote for you? She cried she liked it so much."

That hurt my heart it was so sweet.

(2)

During my last class, I was sitting out in the hall while my students worked through evaluations. A few minutes later I looked up and saw one of my students standing in front of me.

"Hi, Jess," she said.

"Hi," I said.

"I just wanted to come over and tell you thank you," she said. "So, thank you for this semester. I was really angry coming into your class because the college wouldn't accept my high school AP credit and I had to take this all over again, but then you made the semester so great I'm glad it happened that way."

I stopped breathing for a few minutes because that was one of the loveliest things anyone has ever said to me.

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.