At the end of the semester, I sit with my students individually to discuss their grade and their progress throughout the term. It’s the only time I’m guaranteed a one-on-one meeting with each of them, and last week, I arrived early to set up my drink and my papers while I waited for them to sit across from me.
When each student arrived, it was almost as if we were meeting for the first time. They were inevitably taller than I thought, and I realized I’ve only seen them from across the classroom or slouched low in their desk chair. They are younger too. Their faces unlined, freckles scattered in small bursts on pierced noses, hair still in the silk of youth.
They are the same age as my oldest daughter, eighteen, maybe nineteen years old. They’ve seen a little of life. We spent the semester talking about very hard things, and I was surprised at what they know intimately and on which topics they know nothing.
As I sat across from each of them, I fought an internal battle between professor and parent. I thought of how I would like a teacher to address my own daughter, and I did the same for my students. I try, above all, to be kind. Some say this weakens my position as their teacher, but people who say this haven’t worn kindness as strength. They see words as a form of manipulation, rather than the building blocks of one’s inner life.
This spring, as I sat across from my students one by one, I led with kindness, and I didn’t expect much back other than a smile and a quick goodbye. While my lemon La Croix fizzed on the table between us leaving sweat stains that their graded papers quickly sopped up, I explained what they did well and what they needed to improve for next time.
Most of them were anxious to leave, to study or meet a friend for lunch, to calculate their grade point average or sigh in relief. But a few stayed an extra minute or two, and left me with a kind word of their own. It was a gift to receive them.
At one point early in the semester, I had chosen a selection from Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and I tried, in my inexperienced and white-woman way, to foster a discussion about Coates’ experience living in a black man’s body in America. I wrote a graduate paper on this book–I thought I could speak with some degree of authority on the subject, however the classroom is not static. It is alive, unlike my ink-filled paper.
I left that class shaken and certain I’d failed to foster it well. Many students were reluctant to speak, others made uninformed judgements, some fumed silently. I worried the entire semester about the way I handled Coates’ piece, my inexperience on difficult discussions of race on display for so many eyes to see.
During my final conferences, I met with one of my African students. He’d tried valiantly to help me out in the Coates discussion, but he tread lightly, wisely, as a non-American unfamiliar with some of our longstanding racial crises. We chatted for a while, and before he stood to leave, he thanked me for my attempt at leading that particular discussion. However imperfectly I handled it, he was grateful. He was perceptive. He was kind.
This is the strength I speak of when I speak of kindness. Had bystanders well-versed in racial reconciliation been in the classroom that day, they could have rightfully eviscerated my attempts at a discussion. I hate to think of what twitter would have to say. I’m scared of what my friends of color would think. But, it was a try. A swing. A sort of miss. But a try nonetheless. And a student who could have been offended at my inexperience, or angry, or simply annoyed took the time to say thanks for trying.
I can’t tell you what his words meant to me, how they built me up from the inside out, how they poured foundation where there had been quicksand. Later, I thought of how quick I am to judge others who miss on their first, second, even third swing. It’s so easy in an outraged culture to lead with anger, with short fuses and know-it-all-ness. I am the first to admit I’m guilty of this.
Of course, we should strive to lead with excellence. We should know our position. We should speak with authority. But, it’s ok to be a beginner too. It’s ok to be kind and trying. It’s better than reckless and alienating.
I don’t know if I’ll attempt to discuss Coates’ book again when I teach the same course next semester. I am still afraid of the unknown, unmanageable factor of students with their opinions and their baby faces and their need for someone to lead them well.
I don’t know. But, I’m grateful my student took the time to speak life into a situation I’d died a small death over. This is strength. This is no small kindness.
