When three butterflies are better than one apple

By Dr. Heather Bozant Witcher, Young Adults

The end of each college semester is always a surprise to me as an English professor. Sometimes it ends with a crash, other times with a deflated sigh and still others in a jubilation.

I’m still not sure how this semester has ended. There’s certainly relief that it’s over, but there’s also a strange sense of uncertainty.

Across the board, university classrooms have noticed a decline: Students either have opted to continue taking online courses so that they can continue working full-time jobs to make money or they’ve enrolled in face-to-face classes, but the attitude toward the class had changed.

In my own classes, by mid-semester, I experienced decreased attendance and an increase in students not submitting their work.

On the one hand, it’s easy for teachers to put up their defenses: After all, what we get out of something is comparable to the amount of effort that we put in.

But, to me, something seemed off.

So, I asked my students. And that’s when I found out that many of them had gotten used to the last year of extended deadlines, of “easier” work, and many of them simply hadn’t learned – or had to practice – time management.

From hearing their stories, it seemed the biggest difference was that last year the tone was empathetic and caring; this year, that empathy and care was gone. In the return to “normal,” we had forgotten to take into consideration that change was needed.

And students are surprising. After talking with them, I made changes to my syllabus and to the assignments. One of the best things I had ever heard in graduate school was that our syllabus would be a document of perfection for a short period of time – and then the students would walk through the door.

The problem I have with the retort, “It’s in the syllabus,” is that the syllabus isn’t the Ten Commandments. It should change over the course of the semester because the class should be meeting the needs of the students. Sometimes we can’t anticipate all of those needs until we’re in the thick of the semester.

In my upper-level course on life-writing, I assigned an ongoing diary for my students. We would be looking at 19th-century letters and diaries all semester, so it only seemed right to have students model their own diaries off of 19th-century convention. My stipulation: Don’t get too personal; these were public documents that would be shared.

It was the first time I’ve ever assigned something so personal, and, honestly, I wasn’t sure what to expect. But it’s definitely an assignment I’ll use again. I could hear their voices off of the page; I could feel their anxieties and frustrations. But more than anything, I could “see” them outside of the classroom.

I turned in my grades and sat in my office, tidying up after a long semester. One of those life-writing students stopped by and told me she had a letter for me. After an entire semester of reading correspondence, she thought it only fitting to give me one last letter.

In two pages, she articulated how much my class had meant to her, and how much she appreciated the opportunities I had given her. She had enclosed three beautifully decorated origami butterflies because butterflies are symbols of transformation – and I had transformed her mindset.

But, truly, as I read her note with tears in my eyes, it was I who had been changed.

hbozantwitcher@clarionherald.

org