I gave a talk in St. John’s a few weeks ago. When I finished, a woman in the back row stood up and said, “I took a class from you fifteen years ago…”
How would she finish this sentence? And you gave me a lousy mark? And the grammar advice you gave me was incorrect? And you know nothing about American literature? It is funny to reflect on how many options can run through your head in less than one second. It is equally funny to reflect on how all those options are negative. Why do we believe that people hold grudges more readily than anything else?
“… and I came here today to support you.” Over the next couple of minutes, she explained to the audience how she had been a nervous, mature student and how I had helped her adjust to her return to school. As she spoke, I welled up, and I was thrilled that she did not actually have a question to ask me.
The experience was a remarkable one, and it is some indication of how St. John’s has remained a close community, even as it has doubled in size in recent years. I checked my records, and the woman was indeed a good, dedicated student, the kind of student who sustained me as I taught sessionally and raced around the continent trying to secure a full-time job. My glowing memory of her will forever be of that afternoon in the music conservatory when she took time out of her life to return to campus in order to provide me unsolicited sustenance. It is a memory from 2012 and not from 1997-98. You could forgive audience members for imagining that she was a “plant,” that we had kept in touch and that I had arranged her “performance.” But that was not so. I had not spoken to her for fifteen years, and I still have no idea how she learned about my talk.
While we may have vague memories of our students, and while we might remember specific events from the classroom, I am starting to think that students remember the time they share with us in broadest terms: we, and the classes we teach, most often leave general impressions. This student remembered fondly the time she spent with me, her time in English 1110, but when trying to tell the audience what stood out for her, specifically, she recalled my thoroughness, my general support, not a particular thing I said or did during a particular class meeting.
We have hundreds, thousands of students, and while we cannot remember each by name, we do remember faces, we do remember particular classes and the people who took them. For richness of detail, we look back to particular events. I remember our Vice-President’s daughter asking me an embarrassing question in my first year, here; I remember the questions I asked my first graduate student at defence. Our students have far fewer professors, and we provide them each day with an hour of impressions. While I suppose it is possible that one remarkable gesture – positive or negative – can fix us in their minds forever, I am starting to think that the standard for us is both higher and more forgiving. They remember, in a sense, everything that happens, but no one thing necessarily stands out. We are always under surveillance, in a literal sense, and so we have both the chance and the responsibility to improve upon the impression we are making, day after day after day. We cannot expect to fix ourselves in the minds of our students with one brilliant comment; hopefully, one clunky lecture will not do so, either.