Professor Amiga

“I saw you over spring break,” my student says sheepishly, as if she’s confessing to something she did wrong.

“Really? Where?”

She hesitantly names the local art-house movie theater. “It was Saturday night?”

“Oh! I was there for Back to the Future,” the classic movie they were showing last weekend. “It was so fun. You should have said hi.”

She smiles as she demurs — “there was a big crowd” — and she still looks a little embarrassed as she shares, “I was there with friends to see Rocky Horror.” For a split second as she’s describing how her friends marked her cheeks with red Vs for virgin, I think that is why she’s embarrassed, but then another part of my brain realizes, if she was there for the midnight show, she saw me as I was coming out of the theater, walking in a group of friends and holding hands with my boyfriend. Even as I’m laughing at her story along with her classmates, I wonder what she thought to herself or said to her friends upon seeing her instructor out on a Friday night, seeming not much different from herself with her friends.

**

It’s always a tricky line — how close to get to students, especially when classes are small, when the students are older, or when the course material brings personal experiences and narratives into the classroom. All three of those factors came into play in my classroom when I recently taught Into the Wild. Our discussion comparing writer John Krakuer and director Sean Penn’s choices that made the main character — the real-life Christopher McCandless — sympathetic naturally ran aground in the histories of four of my ten students. They had all left home and severed ties with their families at a very young age, leading them to relate very personally to the runaway McCandless, yet two of them, and others, are now parents, which led them to sympathize with the family he left in the dark when he disappeared in the early 1990s. The discussion was unexpectedly passionate, and by the time we finished the four-week unit on Wilderness and Escape, everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

**

I’ve grown close to a few students after their graduations, especially to those who I worked with on independent projects or who served as my teaching or research assistants. I still write at least one letter of recommendation for a South Carolina student every month, despite having left for Arizona in 2008. Only recently have I begun writing letters for my new students, and it’s rewarding to begin making that transition, to feeling important in their careers as well. Recently, in the few minutes before class began one day, I was chatting with my students about everyday topics, like the state budget and their related financial aid worries, about choosing majors, grad schools, and life paths. One student described a friend with many interests who was having trouble focusing on one area for her studies. Casually but quite sincerely, my student said, “I think she’s going to end up — no, I hope she’s going to turn out just like you.”

It was a sudden but flattering reminder that we are often role models for our students. While some see us only as service providers — or even as technicians there to fix their work the way one drops off and picks up dry-cleaning or a broken car — many others see us as one embodiment of their intellectual or professional goals. I like to think that my students will remember I’m not just an interdisciplinary teacher and scholar but also a person, a woman who likes to see a good movie on a Saturday night.