Commencement

my current class taking the midterm

I always get a little nostalgic at Commence-
ment time, which will be in just over a week in Tacoma.  I’ve been teaching at Puget Sound for long enough to have known several classes of students throughout their time at Puget Sound, and graduation is always bittersweet—sweet, of course, because I’m proud of our graduates and happy to see them going off into the world and begin a new phase of their lives, but sad, as well, because the students I’ve gotten to know and like won’t be around on campus anymore. This year, I’ve been thinking about the graduating class, as well as about the contrasts between the kind of education that’s possible at Puget Sound as compared with the university where I’m teaching this year on sabbatical.

Among the graduating class at Puget Sound this year are a group of 15 students that I’ve known since our Writing and Rhetoric seminar together in Fall 2006. We spent a lot of time together because the class was an advising seminar, as well as a residential seminar: We went on field trips together, we had course-related movie nights, we had a meeting at my house. Since the class ended, I’ve had advising meetings for four years with the students who went on to become English majors, and I’ve kept in touch with nearly all of the students—even this year while I’ve been abroad and last year when many of them were abroad (one preceding me here in Tanzania).  Now, as they prepare to leave Puget Sound, these students are accomplished writers, performers, athletes, travelers, and researchers, and they have accrued numerous awards collectively (including four Phi Beta Kappa memberships).  These students have benefited from the many kinds of resources that come with a Puget Sound education—a low student/faculty ratio, up-to-date and comfortable classrooms, a library with easy access to information from across the country and around the world—and those are just a few obvious parts of the infrastructure, supporting academic work alone.  Through these students’ own strengths and through the support they’ve received, I’m sure that they will go on to great things, each in his or her own way.

last week on the road to class, during the rainy season

This spring, I’m teaching a course that is roughly equivalent to the Writing and Rhetoric seminar—a communication skills course for first-year university students here in Zanzibar.  I’m sure there are some terrific students in the class, but I only know the names of a few of them.  It’s not that I’ve gotten negligent.  If anything, teaching this class has kept me on my toes pedagogically; it’s not easy to teach when there are no books and all the course content must come from lectures given in the students’ second language (thankfully, I brought an LCD projector with me to Zanzibar).  The classroom is infested with potentially disease-carrying mosquitoes and is equipped with one working electrical outlet, one small chalkboard, and no working microphones. The most challenging aspect, though, is that there are at least 284 students in the course (I have yet to see a roster, but 284 students have submitted assignments). Between the campus where they study and my office are 10 miles of heavily rutted and near-flooded road, and most students don’t have Internet access, so it’s very difficult to hold office hours or to have informal conversation.  I’m doing the very best I can to make a positive contribution to these students’ educations, but I know that their experience of college will be very different than that of the students in my Writing Rhetoric seminar of Fall 2006 (or of students in any other course at Puget Sound).  They’re certainly getting a lot less writing and speaking experience, as well as a lot less individualized feedback.

So Commencement is for me this year more than usually bittersweet.  As the Puget Sound campus heads into this season of celebratory parties and goodbyes, I have a few parting words for Abbie, Annalise, Bailey, Callie, David, Garrett, Jessy, Katie, Leana, Melissa, Miles, Rachel, Rachel, Robyn, and Wes.  I have enjoyed getting to know each of you, and I hope to continue to hear from you from time to time in your lives after Puget Sound.  I celebrate your many achievements, and I hope that you find joy and success in whatever it is that you try to accomplish.  And I hope that part of what you try to accomplish will be, in some small way, closing one or two of the many gaps between your class and my current class.  I’ll be thinking of you as you cross the stage to receive your diplomas and to commence your lives after college.