On a college town
I walk the obelisk-gray concrete from Hancher to North Hall this morning. First day of fall. The morning air is noticeably cooler than last week, and though I am wearing a blazer I'm not sweating for the first time this semester on my way to class.
A variegated reflection looks up at me from the surface of the Iowa River: refracted orange from the low, morning sun; slanted green from the trees on the banks; facing blue from the vertical sky. A mixed bouquet of fall and summer for me to take with me on my day. "Congratulations! Welcome back to teaching," the river whispers. It’s the first academic year in five I haven't felt like the sixth player on a basketball team.
My previous position as an instructional technologist felt like a consolation prize. “I am a teacher,” I would tell myself, “because I’m teaching faculty.” The problem is that I prefer students to faculty and the yearly renewal of hope and bright-eyed ambition students bring to campus. Each fall at the College of Charleston meant waiting to see if the Classics Department needed me. It's the same sort of feeling my elementary school self felt every July: would my best friend Craig be in my section of second grade? Lots of hope. Lots of anxiety. Lots of room for disappointment. My bias says nothing about the instructional technologist profession. Presenting the most recent pedagogical practices or educational technologies is important. For three years, I stood watch in the tower of pedagogical innovation with zero grading responsibilities and substantial unstructured time to do as I thought best. Even started podcasting. I could make the teaching moves without the teaching load. But it’s just not the same. It was hope deferred, which the Teacher of Proverbs insists sickens the heart. To borrow pandemic language, the regular march of teaching-less semesters was a new strain of COVID to wait out. This won’t last forever, I’d tell myself.
I pause on the bridge to let the moment’s significance root before continuing to North Hall. This former high school is too close to a railroad track and river not to be haunted, I think. It's been one of my favorite places on campus ever since first teaching in it during the Spring of 2013. The walk to North Hall’s back steps with the hillside sweeping up on the left and the river silent and wise on my right reminds me of a walk at my Uncle Myrrl’s in Harrisonburg, Virginia, back in 1993. We were at that time visiting from Sarasota, the Gulf coast town whose existential depth tourists regularly swap for beach trinkets. Harrisonburg’s simplicity, however, wasn’t as easily squandered, and it buzzed with an energy I couldn’t recognize. "What’s different about this place?" I believe is how I asked my mother. "It's a college town," she replied, and somewhere on the walk from College Avenue to Hillcrest Avenue I determined I’d live in a college town if given the chance.
My "Good morning" to a student entering 219 receives a grunt. He’s either not a morning person or one of many unhappy with the grades posted last night. My thoughts start down the rabbit hole of how abstract a percentage grade on an essay really is, but the “random careless rhythm of their chatter”—as Gilbert Highet describes it—distracts me back to the present where I embrace the reality that there's no hope deferred this year. No sick heart. Just the privilege of being part of a team equipping our culture to spot disinformation, find their voices, do justice, and love mercy. I'm a teacher, and the colors and sounds of fall titter with hope.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.
