Working Off a Feel

Finding My Way in a Post-Covid Classroom

It is hard to deny that a light of learning has been, if not snuffed out, then seriously dimmed in young people as a result of Covid and its drastic interruption to their education and social-emotional development. This was apparent to me on my first day back to teaching, but I have felt it more deeply these last few weeks, as students seem to be struggling to get by, to stay engaged, to know what to do, and to simply show up. The other day, while leading a discussion on late-stage capitalism and black women in the family, I looked around and noticed a room full of people who seemed largely adrift, exhausted and, if I am being totally honest, simply unwell. I stopped mid-sentence, paused for a moment or two, put my papers to the side, and asked, are you all okay? After what appeared to be shock that a professor might notice anything at all where they are concerned, let alone their mental and emotional states, the collective answer was a resounding no. One student literally said to me: Well, no ma’am. Since you’re asking, we are not okay at all.

Although I spent my time of plague-living in the tiny (quite privileged and secluded) mountain town of Telluride, Colorado, and so was somewhat shielded from the impacts of the pandemic, as were my children, I had a general sense that college students would be noticeably changed when I returned to the university classroom this Fall. Knowing that I would be teaching kids who went through high school and their key college preparatory years during the pandemic, I supposed that there might be observable learning impacts on reading and writing, that they would be leaning harder on technology and AI, specifically, to get their work done, that they would be less responsive to deadlines and requirements, and that they might need more handholding than overachieving, eager, comparatively self-sufficient students I left at University of North Carolina in 2018. What I was not prepared for, however, was a deeper kind of fragility and how, bearing witness to that, I would be changed as an educator in ways that I never could have imagined.

Faculty are perennially annoyed by what can only be lovingly referred to as the triflingness of undergraduates on college campuses, and I certainly put myself in that camp. Most of us genuinely like our students, but are regularly disappointed by things like their not coming to class, failing to come to office hours, not doing the readings, missing key dates on the calendar, a paralytic attachment to devices in the classroom, and a general inability to help themselves when they are not doing well (by, say, simply coming to class, doing the readings or showing up to office hours, which is rather like asking them to cut off a limb these days; indeed, only two students in my class even knew where the political science building was located on campus and only one knew where to go to print out something on an actual sheet of paper). As might be expected, all of this worsened in the wake of Covid, as students struggled with significant learning impacts and were not able to “catch up” as quickly as anyone hoped, and so they tended to fall behind more quickly and in ways they might not have had they not missed key instructional time in high school during the pandemic. Their ability to deal with missteps and lags in the classroom has been, of course, further hampered by the fact that these students tend to demonstrate less independence, self-reliance and resilience, and, most troubling, are experiencing higher rates of psychological and emotional problems. A 2022 study by Harvard showed a high prevalence of mental challenges among college students, with 95.7% of the sample experiencing moderate or severe mood disorders. Respondents' education was severely affected by the pandemic, averaging a score of 7.6 on a scale of 10 when asked how much their learning quality was affected. They also showed increased fear, stress, and decreased happiness, and these seem to be directly associated with their learning quality change. All of which is to say, when the young people I have in my class right now showed up on the VCU campus for their first day of college, many of them were wholly ill-prepared—academically, socially and emotionally—for the work that they would be asked, well, required, to do.

A younger, less wizened, pre-pandemic Hollie did not struggle with or lose much sleep over how to appropriately respond to students’ failings and fuck ups in the classroom. I have always tried to be both firm and affirming, to have hard lines but to make exceptions when it made sense to do so, to maintain high standards but to make clear that my evaluations of their academic work is not a reflection of how I feel about them personally (for those who care) or how they will do out in the real world. I take my students seriously, and often this takes the form of holding them accountable in ways they do not like or that are stressful for them. More than I would like, I am obliged to simply fail them when they have not done the work. For college kids who may come from more privileged backgrounds and are used to countless “second chances,” this is particularly challenging. In the past, I did not loose any sleep over this, and managed to meet their resistance (and sometimes their parents’ displeasure!) with concern but resolve. This has allowed me to maintain my own academic integrity and sense of fairness, which, until recently, was of the utmost importance to me.

These days, I am quite at sea in the classroom, unsure of how to help students achieve success, when they have been so marked by something as extraordinary as the Covid 19 pandemic. In a place like Telluride, where the kids skied through it all, had enormous personal and public resources available to them, continued to socialize and play outside together as they do year-round, and were doing in-person learning at school while much of the rest of the country was still in lock-down, it was hard to see the impact. It’s safe to say that many of us carried on as usual, not fully appreciating how the rest of the world was managing, or not, as the case often was. But now that I am here in Richmond and teaching in a university classroom with young people who did online learning for upwards of two full years and whose lives were dramatically impacted in other ways—parents losing their jobs, multiple parents or grandparents dying, lack of preparation for college, mental health setbacks, now having to work multiple jobs while in school, etc.—the effects of college-age folks are palpable. Students seem to have arrived at university without any real sense of what that would mean, what would be asked or expected of them. Many of them have formal accommodations now whereas a student with similar capacities and limitations prior to the pandemic might not have, but those accommodations, when granted, don’t seem to make much of a positive difference in terms of academic performance. They don’t really know the meaning of a hard deadline, don’t seem interested in doing the readings and seem genuinely shocked that they should be asked to do so. Most of them have not visited the library other than to hang out in the Starbucks on the first floor, and they do not feel obliged to bring the readings to class with them, let alone print them out on their own. (They did say they would try not to lose any hard copies that I printed out for them and would make a good faith effort to bring them on the days when those readings would be discussed.) Attendance, if it is not mandatory, is not something about which they seem overly concerned (that’s generally true even if it is mandatory), and they don’t mind telling you that something else came up or they were simply unable to get it together to be there. All of this and more has shocked me and I have had to, as a colleague delicately suggested to me recently, adjusted my expectations down in light of the new post-Covid student.

I confess, I am not very good at this. But I am trying. I am trying to remember what these young folks have gone through and how drastically different the world is now than it was four years ago, and how changed they and all of us are after Covid. Although I love reading now more than ever, and see how central reading and writerly practices are, not just for professional development but for personal healing, my students are not so inclined. They cannot see much of anything so clearly right now, or at least many of them can’t, and they are still doing a lot of self-discovery work that normally takes place in high school. College forces them to be social in ways they are not well practiced in and to be accountable in ways they have not yet had to be, and I am trying to strike that balance of holding fast to reasonable standards and goals that I have as an educator, which I believe to be in my students’ interests and which I am required to meet, while also giving where I can and moving from a place of compassion, more than anything else.

I was a bit of a hard ass as a younger professor. There are probably a few reasons for this, none of them particularly good ones. For one, I was young, so there’s that. And coming out of graduate school we are all so terribly insecure, as a dear old grad school friend reminded me recently, and often that manifests as overcompensation as an authority figure in the classroom. And I was trying to establish myself early on in my career and figure out who I would be as a teacher. Perhaps I thought that was what being a “good professor” looked like. But I am embarrassed to admit that it also made my life easier, in a way, to not think overmuch about my students’ hardships and challenges. I could keep things clean and uniform by treating everyone the same, sticking to only the business at hand, and not really concerning myself too much with the overall wellness of the humans before me.

But the world is different now, and so am I. Like my students, I am also rediscovering myself after the pandemic, figuring out what is expected of me, and trying to determine my own capacities and weaknesses in this new world. I feel like I am struggling to wake up from a long sleep, where everything felt invisible and magnified at once, where little things became big things and big things went hardly noticed for the better part of three years, and where we lived in a strange dream in which nothing was familiar and everything was on repeat. Of course we are changed, how could we not be? And to carry on in our learning communities as if everything was the same and we are all okay would be counterproductive and, to my mind, unconscionable. And perhaps it’s not just reflection on the pandemic that has softened me but my experiences as a parent that have taught me to give a little, as well. At least one of my children has more than one diagnosis that will likely necessitate accommodations and my other child has not quite been the same since having Covid in the Fall of 2021. He is sick frequently and often quite seriously, and we have no solid explanation for it as of yet. I’m a parent who knows in a deeper way now how hard it is for young people to just get through, to simply be human, and being human is so different now in ways that we have not yet been able to fully articulate. I am a parent who would want someone in my shoes as a teacher to show my own child compassion and to ask if they were quite okay if it seemed they were not. Before, if a student told me they were exhausted from working their night job and they simply forgot to get a head start on an assignment due that morning before class, I would have said, sorry, the deadline is the deadline. Now, I simply say, sure, how much time do you need? It’s no skin off my nose to give a student a little more time, or to check in if they seem to have fallen off, or to simply ask: are you okay?

There is a beautiful documentary called Buck about the renowned horse trainer Buck Brannaman, who is a survivor of child abuse and who went on to become one of the world’s leading experts in relationships between horses and humans, and, I would say, understands quite a lot about human fragility and excellence as a result of his work with horses and people over the decades. In that film, he talks a lot about how to get a horse to “work off a feel,” and how to get them to do something they may not want to or that may be very hard for them without being unfair or cruel to them. Trainers, too, have to be habituated to a feel, if they are to be truly good and decent guides for their horses. Working off a feel requires an intuition in the trainer and a kind of uptake in the horse that comes from a cultivated attunement to one another’s needs and capacities. He says, “Most people think of feel as when you touch something or someone – what it feels like to your fingers. But a feel can have a thousand different definitions. Sometimes feel is a mental thing, sometimes a feel can happen clear cross the arena. Sort of an invitation from the horse to come to you.”

Buck Brannaman, circa 2012

Nowadays, rather than demanding this or that from my students (or my children) and maintaining that hard line for which a younger version of myself was rather well known, I am learning to work off a feel. I am newly aware of others’ fragility and vulnerability to life’s surprises and cruelty, and rather than further dim the light of those I am tasked with giving an education, I look to create some space, to find some breathing room, so that flame inside of them can burn a little brighter again. I am less concerned with my responsibility to ensure their success in the future than I am concerned with how they are doing right now. I still have expectations, of course, and there are measures and standards that I must abide by in order to formerly and fairly evaluate each student’s work. And some days I have to give answers they don’t like or that seem to land harder than they used to in the days before the pandemic. I lose more sleep now over my decisions than I used to because the stakes seem higher to me, and I take that not as a sign that Covid has softened me but rather that it has made me more sensitive to my students’ fragility. I am certainly more aware of my own. I’m learning to give them grace, which the writer Marilynne Robinson once described as a posture of understanding, and which I have come to understand as a posture of compassion, too. And in giving this to my students, I am learning to give it to myself, as a teacher and as a parent. We have been through a lot, us humans, these last four years, and there is yet more still to come. I do not know where else to begin, except to begin again each day, with grace.