I often wonder if what I do makes any difference at all in the world. I have been teaching on the university level for close to 17 years. Doing the math, I've taught, on average, about two classes every fall and winter semester, with an occasional spring and summer session thrown into the mix. In each class, I've had roughly 25 students, sometimes a couple more, sometimes a couple less. So, that's approximately 100 students a year for 17 years, or 1,700 students. Throw in a couple hundred more for overload and spring/summer classes. That brings the total number of minds I've molded to 1,900.
There's this nagging feeling in my gut, however, that I somehow passed a student in one of my courses who was functionally illiterate. Next on the Hallmark Channel, Jim Carrey stars as a man who graduates from a small, northern Michigan university with a degree in English and ends up indigent, begging of the streets of Detroit because (grab the Kleenex box, folks) he can't read!!
Just a few weeks ago, I opened my local newspaper and saw the face of a former student. I remember her distinctly. She was in a summer class I taught on narrative and descriptive writing, and she was a soft-spoken, lovely woman who frequently visited my office in the years after the class was done just to visit. She asked about my wife, my daughter. One Halloween, she went to see The Rocky Horror Show with my wife and me and some friends. I stopped seeing her on campus a few years ago, and, as my life got complicated, I never really thought about her. Last week, my student was arrested for robbing two banks with a toy gun. (Knowing this person, the toy gun doesn't surprise me.)
My lessons in dialogue and place description didn't make my student a modern Bonnie Parker. As I stared at her mug shot in the newspaper, though, I wondered how many teachers and friends and family had dropped the ball in her life. I know she had children. Maybe if I had kept in touch, sent her a Christmas card, tracked her down on Facebook, done something to show her that I cared about her well-being, she wouldn't have ended up looking like a fugitive from America's Most Wanted. Maybe.
That's what Blessed Placida Viel would have done. I'm sure none of her students slipped through the cracks. Born Victoria Eulalia Jacqueline Viel in Normandy in 1815, Placida made education one of the priorities of her career as a nun. She was chosen superior-general of the Sisters of Christian Schools in 1846. In that role, she established orphanages and nurseries and education programs. By the time of her death in 1877, she had started 36 schools for the poor and destitute.
In all that I've learned about saints, there seems to be one common denominator: saints leave the world a better place because of their lives and actions. Placida's legacy is 36 schools and thousands of children educated who wouldn't otherwise have had a chance. That's a legacy worthy of the title "saint." My legacy, so far, is a bank robber.
I find that number frightening.
I've had close to 2,000 lives to screw up. Now, I know that my ability or inability to teach someone the difference between a comma splice and a comma fault error, or the nuance of theme and motif, will not make that someone a crack addict. (I'll lay the blame for that one at the feet of college-level bowling instructors. The only "C" I ever received in college was in bowling, and that grade ruined my Christmas and drove me to an angry night of drinking with a friend. Crack was only a "D" away.)
There's this nagging feeling in my gut, however, that I somehow passed a student in one of my courses who was functionally illiterate. Next on the Hallmark Channel, Jim Carrey stars as a man who graduates from a small, northern Michigan university with a degree in English and ends up indigent, begging of the streets of Detroit because (grab the Kleenex box, folks) he can't read!!
Just a few weeks ago, I opened my local newspaper and saw the face of a former student. I remember her distinctly. She was in a summer class I taught on narrative and descriptive writing, and she was a soft-spoken, lovely woman who frequently visited my office in the years after the class was done just to visit. She asked about my wife, my daughter. One Halloween, she went to see The Rocky Horror Show with my wife and me and some friends. I stopped seeing her on campus a few years ago, and, as my life got complicated, I never really thought about her. Last week, my student was arrested for robbing two banks with a toy gun. (Knowing this person, the toy gun doesn't surprise me.)
My lessons in dialogue and place description didn't make my student a modern Bonnie Parker. As I stared at her mug shot in the newspaper, though, I wondered how many teachers and friends and family had dropped the ball in her life. I know she had children. Maybe if I had kept in touch, sent her a Christmas card, tracked her down on Facebook, done something to show her that I cared about her well-being, she wouldn't have ended up looking like a fugitive from America's Most Wanted. Maybe.
That's what Blessed Placida Viel would have done. I'm sure none of her students slipped through the cracks. Born Victoria Eulalia Jacqueline Viel in Normandy in 1815, Placida made education one of the priorities of her career as a nun. She was chosen superior-general of the Sisters of Christian Schools in 1846. In that role, she established orphanages and nurseries and education programs. By the time of her death in 1877, she had started 36 schools for the poor and destitute.
In all that I've learned about saints, there seems to be one common denominator: saints leave the world a better place because of their lives and actions. Placida's legacy is 36 schools and thousands of children educated who wouldn't otherwise have had a chance. That's a legacy worthy of the title "saint." My legacy, so far, is a bank robber.
One out of 1,900 is not a bad record, I know. Odds are, though, among the 1,899 other students, there are drug dealers, alcoholics, adulterers, and Republicans. Judging my success as a teacher by one troubled soul is like reading 50 student evaluations at the end of a semester and rating my performance on the single person who gave me all "D's" and wrote the word "asshole" on the back of the evaluation sheet. It's hard not to take something like that personally. It causes me flashbacks to bowling class.
But I continue to teach in good faith, knowing that, for every Bonnie Parker, Steven Segal, or George W. Bush in my classes, there might be a Martin Luther King, Meryl Streep, or Placida Viel.
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