this is farewell.

 

Oct. 14, 8:42 PM

Oct. 20, 10:34 PM

Oct 26., 12:16 AM 

Nov. 2, 7:35 PM

Nov. 3, 10:14 PM

Nov. 15, 10:49 PM

Last Wednesday, Nov 17, 8:53 PM

This is it. The only thing left are papers to deliver in, papers to grade, and people to say goodbye to. It's strange. Not being in the space anymore once everyone leaves. I doubt the freedom that Freire and hooks believed could be a reality would take shape only after leaving education. Not taking the same paths every night home, reaching for the key to the front door with a heavy frame and heavy heart. Now, I'm not going to see this place as a daily occurrence. 

Do you remember the beginning of this semester? Everything in lush green, the drive of an hour up to Denton didn't feel as long. The picture taken that still hangs outside the TA space. I don't recognize that person anymore. 4 months felt like 4 days and 4 years at the same time. 

I remember this line from the original Korean "The Good Doctor" show. "My hope is that you'll get better, and that I will never have to see you here like this again". Teaching is the same way. We want to build rapport, see them grow, and yet have to watch them grow and sometimes fade away into little more than impressions of a memory. Soon enough, my time here will be like the paths I had to walk every night, forgotten yet felt. 

#LifeGoesOn. Don't linger too much. We have to start again soon. The next mission. I had this illusion as a child, that once you've gained something you wouldn't have to work as hard to maintain it. physics seemed to support that notion. But the reality of the modern human is that there is also another task to take on. Always. Until the end of time. Until we explode away from sheer exhaustion. We are quite unsatisfied creatures. We keep doing what we are, without clear motivation in the present moment. We've talked of the practicality needed to teach students - motivation, engagement, Dannels' questions for teachers. The most important question, similarly with other fields, is how we are still doing this work?

At the end of this semester, I found the answer. I see it in the spark in professors eyes. When we tell them something funny and they laugh at it. A student answers a question coreectly after a semester of not participating in class. When a student says, after more than 2 decades, something that the teacher has never heard before and it sounded immediately like a genius concept. Watching them grow and change, and discover something about themselves. 

But its there too when a teachers' heart falls apart. A professor of mine told me one time she ran into a former student, and how that student became homeless after graduating. She said that she felt like she failed as a teacher. I imagine there are those rough days, as well as the good days. We do it because we feel alive while doing it. We became a part of a larger process, if we can of course overcome the classist pedagogy of the nesting dolls of power. Teaching, really, is about leaving behind trails for others. My hope then, as a teacher, is to make sure students in their academic careers will only see these images above as images, and not something that they personally live through.