As a professor, I end up doing a lot of Q and A, and I think I do an OK-job of fielding spontaneous questions. It’s funny how the big flubs stick with you. I’m still thinking of a student of mine at a local community college about five years ago. The class was at 8 am on a Friday morning, and met for 3 hours. It had been a long, early morning drive for me; some of my students were just getting off of the night shift at their jobs. Some student slept through class, and I let them. I felt a strong class solidarity with my students. We were all struggling together, and we shared some amazing, goofy, insightful, and memorable times. If I had the means, I would still be teaching at community colleges – I wish the pay was sustainable.
Anyway, our Intro to Psychology class was talking about prenatal development in terms of synaptic pruning, and a student shouted “I don’t know if I’m fertile.” Y’all. I don’t know how or why, but my brain broke in that moment, and I could not think of a single thing to say. I lost who and where I was, but when I was back in my body, I realized that it was completely silent and every student was looking at me. Even the ones who were sleeping a moment before. I don’t remember how I responded. Every once in awhile that memory will pop up and that feeling washes over me.
Other memorable CC moments:
-For health psychology, students were tasked with a behavior modification wherein they shaped their health habits and collecting data. A student wrote an amazing paper about how he was curbing his cocaine use. It received a well-earned A, and I found it cheeky as hell.
-A student in a class of 30 raised his hand and told me that he had been “matched” with me on a dating site, and didn’t know whether to swipe left of swipe right because he didn’t want to hurt my feelings. The class was HYSTERICAL about it, and I deleted my dating profile shortly after.
-The student who brought her son to class one day. He must have been 11 or 12, and he sat quietly in the back of the class with a book. Every once in awhile I would catch his gaze, and I realized that he was actively attending to the lecture.
-The course evaluations from students. Which, by the way, were surprisingly hard to obtain. They were written by hand, and stored on campus, and you could only read them by making the trip to their office. Seriously, they could have been scanning and emailed in mere minutes, but for some reason that was impossible? I drove down there every semester to read those impossible-to-get evaluations. I still think about those students a lot. I wonder what they remember, or if anything they learned in class ended up being important to them. If you’re one of them, please get in touch 🙂
