The cyclical rhythm of the academic year is one of the greatest perks of being a professor. Many of us still know the buzz of possibility when summer ends and the campus parking lots begin filling up again. The winter break, too, brief as it is, can be as restorative as a deep, purifying breath. The poignancy of the fall semester’s ending is enhanced for me, no doubt, by the darkening days leading to and from the solstice and into uncharted seas. I suspect that even the most cynical among us can hear the whispered promises each new year brings.
As a unit of time, the semester has great power even though its parameters are arbitrary. Whatever rationale the academic calendar may once have had means nothing to most of us now. And, of course, despite our fealty to semesters, we routinely violate their boundaries by working with students on long-term projects, as well as our own ongoing service commitments and scholarly work. Summer teaching too, especially when done online, disrupts the familiar stop-and-start school year rhythm. Most of us are not, it is clear, rigidly wedded to traditional academic rhythms and could not flourish in our jobs if we were.
And it’s also not true that we are on break in any normal sense. I gently bit the head off the last person who asked me if I had big plans for my winter “vacation.” The truth is, that though last semester’s grades have been submitted, I’m busily retooling my courses for next term, revising a paper to submit early in the new year, and fielding questions and requests from previous and upcoming students. There are all sorts of deadlines and due dates that have no respect for the fact that I am on “break.” But even so, there is this peaceful sense of closure, of a chapter ending in my professional life, that most workers never enjoy.
I suspect that this stop-and-start rhythm may also help account for the effective teacher-student relationships many of us form. I can give my students fifteen weeks of more or less steady energy, and expect them to pony up some in return, partly because our time together is well-bounded and brief. For better and worse, it is often easiest to lend one’s best self to a new acquaintance with whom one is merely taking a short journey than to, say, a life partner. The pressure that the semester’s looming, inevitable ending places on the participants, an ending that is always visible on the horizon, can nourish the productive intensity of the classroom experience.
A school term can perform this framing function, I think, whether it’s a “good” semester, full of energetic and capable students, or a “bad” one in which things never fully click. Surely there’s some broader lesson in impermanence and detachment here? How, I wonder, can we move into each new term, with hands more fully open, embracing the knowledge that, whatever else these upcoming months bring, it will all end? Whether we and our students love and respect one another or are mutually repelled, soon it will be over. Surely, in light of this benevolent, merciless constraint of time, I can offer my full presence and attention, right? And, besides, isn’t the school term just a microcosm of the structure of time that bounds and gives shape to our very lives?
It is no wonder, then, that, for fortunate professors like me, these thrumming beginnings and solemn denouements form the basic architecture of our professional identities. It’s a rhythm that mirrors the habitual relief of falling into bed each night and the hopeful possibility that can nudge one out of bed each morning. This drip-drip-drip of time is almost comforting in its honesty, and the response it invites from me is just as straightforward: I am to accept the weight of yet another snowy Midwestern winter as I clear my desktop and my driveway in these waning days of 2020. As I move forward, my left foot finds the oblique, diffuse light of the future while, for a long moment, my right one remains in the shadowy past.
I wish I were fool enough to believe that this unwritten, upcoming calendar year might magically wash away the grinding horror of our national circumstances, not to mention the stains of a remarkably difficult year for me personally. But though 2020 brought difficulty and disruption, I do not want to rush through its ending. Instead, I choose to bask in this caesura, this animated liminality, like a hibernating frog on a muddy pond bottom. And I dare anyone to repeat the tired accusation that professors are eternal schoolchildren, never having matured enough to enter the “real world.” What could be more real, more elemental and momentous, than letting go and starting over again and again and again?
The Virtual Pedagogue 