To help me be more critical and mindful of the bonds I’m forging in and out of the classroom, I write anonymous letters to some of my current and former students. This is the 11th post in the series.
Dear N,
It was wonderful seeing you last week. What a pleasant surprise! I was walking out of my classroom to get lunch and there you were with one of our guidance counselors in the hallway. You were visiting to get some paperwork in order.
I never know what I’m going to feel when I see former students. There’s happiness and excitement, of course, when I see how much they’ve grown and changed in the years since teaching them. Sometimes, when I forget their names, I feel guilt and embarrassment and hope I’m not put on the spot or slip up. But no matter who it is, there’s almost always nostalgia as I think back to my time teaching them.
For the record: Hardly any of these feelings are given time to breathe in our brief conversations, which usually happen when these students come back to visit. Afterward, I’m left putting my feelings together like a jigsaw puzzle when its pieces are dumped out of the box.
With you, what I felt was tied to a particular set of interactions we had.
It was the 2020-21 school year, also known as the school year from hell. You were in my advisory. We met once a week, every Friday, for an hour. Like everything else, it was on Zoom. The “Advisory Committee” at my school created slides to guide our discussions, but I rarely followed them. The materials were too ambitious and impersonal and disregarded the fact that we were remote. As a result, we did our own thing.
One of the things we did came from you. Specifically, your writing. After I learned of your passion for storytelling, I invited you to share some of your writing with our advisory. Without hesitation, you consented.
What followed was several months of reading and reflecting on one of your original stories. Each week, you wrote a new chapter. A third of our time together was spent reading and discussing it instead of doing whatever was on the slides. We took turns unmuting ourselves to read and ask you questions about the characters, plot, and setting. We debated and cursed characters for their decision-making. It was a wildly unique experience.
There weren’t many good things that happened in my classes during the 2020-21 school year. But your story was one of them. It was a candlelight in a dark room. We were all so isolated that year, so disconnected, but for those 20 minutes we were immersed in your writing, we weren’t. We were as one. What’s more is that, on a good day, there were just 5 of us in class on any given Friday. The depth and clarity of your story, however, made it feel larger and more full.
Thus, your storytelling pulled off an amazing feat: It not only brought us together, but multiplied us. It was a solace for remote learning, a balm for my scarred pedagogy. Looking forward to the next chapter each week and subsequently getting lost in it fostered community at a time when community was nowhere to be found.
I realized all this the moment I saw you in the hallway last week. It’s a shame that I didn’t have the words then. This letter will have to suffice. I hope you understand how grateful I am for you.
You told me you were in college and that you’re still doing what you love, writing. I couldn’t help but notice how you lit up when you told me this. It’s fulfilling to know that the many smiles your writing created for us on Zoom are now finding their way back to you.
Be well,
Mr. Palacios
lazy 0ch0 