My soft spots: C students and beset store managers
I am in line at the local Walgreens, where the man ahead of me has launched into a young manager about the store’s shortcomings.
The man starts by saying that the shelves are empty, though they aren’t. I’ve just walked down four full aisles, though I admit I did grab the last three boxes of Whoppers. My bad.
The man, however, is exercised over the store’s lack of 24pack AA batteries. The manager keeps his cool, and explains that supply chains have been interrupted, that things are on order. This does not deter the man. He has penciled in “Have a fit at Walgreens,” and he must run out the tape. He bags his things and harrumphs out.
I’m going to guess batteries are not at the heart of this man’s pain.
We’re all tense. This week, after a promising spring, we head into our fourth pandemic semester in worse shape than we’d hoped. In the spring, we lined up for vaccines. The tunnel we entered at the start of the pandemic looked like it was widening.
With our newfound freedom, we gave hugs. We saw grandchildren.
But this week, instead of stepping back into school to observe Before Times protocols, we watch COVID cases, hospitalizations and deaths on the rise — even in Connecticut, where at this writing our positivity rate hovers around 3 percent.
My school requires vaccinations, and we are at roughly 90 percent. People can file for exemptions, but on-campus vaccinations will be offered to the holdouts. The official emails are detailed as to what to expect and what’s allowed. It’s exhausting, so I’m going to focus on this:
This summer, I taught a communication law class during a short semester that began in early July and ended a couple of weeks ago. In the class, we focus on, among other topics, trademarks, obscenity, privacy, protest and the First Amendment. I am never at a loss for real-life examples in the glorious, extended conversation about what we mean when we say “free speech.”
The class, which I created, was online, so my only contact with students was via the class website and email.
Here is where I need to say that when I took this class as an undergraduate, I got a C, and that was a gift from a sympathetic professor. I have no explanation for why I didn’t earn a better grade, other than to say that I was, at best, a tepid student.
And here is where I need to apologize to all my professors for the arrogance of my youth.
I write college courses with the phoning-it-in student in mind because I was one. I try to make classes lively, quirky and deep, but I am not here to entertain you. To survive this course, you must read a lot, write more than you planned and engage in critical thinking.
For the final paper, students were to pick their favorite court case from the class and write about the circumstances that led to the case, whether (considering what they now know about First Amendment law) they agree with the court’s decision and under what circumstances — if any —students could see their cases being overturned.
You cannot fake this paper. All assignments were due at 11:59 p.m. the last day of class. Early that day, I logged in to get started grading the assignments that were trickling in and saw that one student, probably in an effort to be done already, had turned in a final paper that was less than half what she needed to do, 288 words compared with the 750 to 1,000 that were required.
At the start of every class, I tell students that I want them to succeed. I am still working out what that means. Even before the pandemic, you could bring academic conversations to a grinding halt by trying to locate that sweet spot between empathy and coddling. Yes, we’re in a pandemic and everyone is stressed, and how much should that figure in to the grading process?
I emailed the author of the 288-word final paper to tell her she still had a few hours before the class deadline, and I suggested she dig back in and take another crack. And then I logged out.
A few hours after I sent the email, I logged back on to find that the student had handed in a new paper.
We are all strung out. The store shelves aren’t empty, but they feel that way. We got vaccinated only to find our neighbors don’t care enough about us to do the same, and so we are still talking about COVID, the Delta/ Lambda/Gamma version. This would all be easier if someone could just tell us when we can return to Before Times, but buried in all the mess — the masks, the vaccination records, the acrimony that happens when people ignore science — are moments of grace.
With her second effort, the student turned in a solid B paper, and lifted her final grade out of the basement. I emailed her again, this time to encourage her to stop by my office once school begins. I want to meet her. I have a soft spot for people who don’t give up. Good luck to all of us.
Susan Campbell is the author of “Frog Hollow: Stories From an American Neighborhood,” “Tempest-Tossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker,” and “Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl.” She is a distinguished lecturer at University of New Haven, where she teaches journalism.