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Washington Post
The Meaning of a College Literature Class - During a Pandemic and Always
English Departments are increasingly under pressure to justify their
existence. But have the eternal lessons of Great Books ever mattered
more?
By Carlo Rotella
Oct. 20, 2020
The first day of class has an immemorial feel to it, an air of familiar
routines eternally renewed. It’s just about noon on Tuesday, Jan. 14,
2020, the start of spring semester. I am standing at the front of the
room behind a table with a lectern on it. The 34 students, all
freshmen, are seated in rows before me. They’re expectant, a little
nervous. Me, too, though I have had a lot more practice at hiding it.
Having reached the midpoint of what I like to think of as 47th grade,
I’m closing in on a hundred semesters as either student or teacher.
That’s a lot of first days of class.
The classroom has windows that open, a door that closes, heating,
chalkboards and chairs with attached desk arms for the students. That’s
all I need from it for this class, a section of a required course known
as Lit Core, the one literature class that almost all of the
university’s undergraduates take, regardless of major. Except for the
occasional writing workshop during which I will project paragraphs from
student papers on the classroom screen from my laptop, we won’t be
taking advantage of the room’s advanced technological capabilities this
semester. The way I teach it, Lit Core is as basic as you can get:
Humans pay close attention to books and one another.
Time to get down to first-day business. Going over the syllabus, I
explain that in Lit Core we work on the fundamental skill of extracting
meaning from language, and we do that by making interpretive arguments
— together in class discussions, individually in writing — about the
elaborately worked language of literature. There’s nothing cutting-edge
about what we’re going to do, and I haven’t tried to pick the most
important novels and short stories for us to read. I just picked works
that fit the general theme I’ve chosen for the course, stories about
misfits, and that are resonantly expressive enough to reward the effort
to interpret them.
I ask the students to introduce themselves each in turn to the group,
beginning the process of getting everyone accustomed to speaking up,
which I require. I won’t lecture much in our class meetings. Mostly I
will frame analytical problems for us to work out together. How does
the opening scene of this novel set up the ideas it will explore and
the ways it will explore them? What’s the effect of this word choice,
that image, these repetitions? We’ll get stuck, get ourselves unstuck,
get stuck again, go around, keep trying to perceive the relationship
between how a text is put together and what meanings it makes available
to us.
This is not sorcery, though it can feel that way to many people who
have sat in English classes and wondered — admiringly, resentfully,
suspiciously — how those who seem more confident about interpretation
come up with the things they say. But there’s nothing mysterious about
the analysis of literature. Think of it as an exercise in pattern
recognition. You notice things — word choices, imagery, details of
setting, references to other works and to events and ideas outside the
text, the narrator’s point of view, the sequence in which the story
unfolds, echoes and variations, and so on — and you try to discern some
ordering logic that emerges from those patterns. I think of
interpretation as a creative act in which we go into the text to gather
the materials to make something: a persuasive argument about what
meanings we find there. I’m agnostic about what particular meanings the
students might want to argue for; I just want them to do it well. We’re
practicing a craft somewhere between art and science, like
cabinetmaking or cultivating a vegetable patch.
That craft is basic equipment for living for any citizen, any worker,
any thinking person. We swim in a sea of language, and very little of
it means only or exactly what it says: “Thou shalt not kill,” “We hold
these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,”
“Mistakes were made,” “We think of our company as a family,” “Build the
wall.” To function in the world we need to understand how meaning moves
on the surface of the words and in the sometimes murky depths beneath
that surface, and we must attend to form — to how something is said —
to get at the fullness of what it says.
The scene we’re getting ready to enact every Tuesday and Thursday for
the next 15 weeks may feel timeless to me, but it’s not. My colleague
Dayton Haskin, who’s writing a book about the study of literature in
American universities, tells me that give-and-take discussions of
literature in English began happening in only a few college classrooms
in the late 19th century. They were early exceptions to a prevailing
model in which professors lectured and called on students to recite,
and those students often read about literature, rather than directly
reading the works themselves. The conversational model that feels
natural to me caught on very gradually over the course of the next
century, driven by broader changes in how we think about schooling,
knowledge and authority. The now-widespread institution of a class in
which undergraduates talk about literature didn’t begin to become
normal until after the 1960s. What we do in the classroom has a history
that connects it to the world beyond.
My class is as basic as you can get: Humans pay close attention to books and one another.
I can feel the forces at play in our own historical moment pressing in
on our classroom, leaving their imprint on our little commonwealth. To
get to Lit Core the students have had to survive a college admissions
process that has mutated into an all-consuming campaign resembling an
arms race or running for Congress. On the other end, after they leave
Lit Core and make it through the rest of college, they will graduate
into a job market short on actual jobs and long on unpaid internships,
contingent and insecure labor, and the assumption of parental
assistance.
These increasingly forbidding pathways to and from the classroom are
part of a deep shift in the social lay of the land. In this country
we’re moving from a familiar and somewhat fluid tripartite class
structure — working, middle, upper — toward a more rigid and binary
one: haves and have-nots. The cost of college, which includes the cost
of doing what it takes to get in, has soared as the middle class has
continued to hollow out, and as greater numbers of international
students willing to pay full freight have come to American campuses.
That cost is increasingly out of reach for the have-nots and those who
feel themselves sliding in that direction. Most people with whom I went
to college in the 1980s expected to rise up past their parents’
high-water mark as a matter of course. A lot of my students, including
well-to-do ones, do not expect to ever get anywhere near what their
parents have. My students are more consistently professional about
school than my college cohort was, and also a lot more anxious.
As the middle class shrinks and it gets harder for young people getting
started in adult life to wriggle up through the tightening passage into
the magic circle of the haves, English and other disciplines in the
humanities have come under increasing pressure to justify their
existence. The facts don’t really support the notion that they’re
somehow less practical or valuable than other disciplines (English
majors’ lifetime earnings are similar to those of their peers who major
in STEM subjects, for instance, which underscores the silliness of
arguing that “there’s no job called English”), but the numbers of
majors and tenure-line faculty in the humanities are indeed declining
at many schools. That’s not all bad, as I see it, since in my
experience the shrinkage in English majors has come off the bottom: The
quality has gone up as the quantity has gone down. Still, the decline
has encouraged talk of a crisis of the humanities, and questions in
particular about the role of literature in the college curriculum. Why
should students pay through the nose to spend three weeks on “The House
of Mirth”? Shouldn’t they be tripling down on science, technology,
engineering and math instead? Why require the study of literature at
all?
And, of course, there’s yet one more life-alteringly potent force just
coming into view on the horizon, still far from the classroom but
closing in on it. On Jan. 11 the first confirmed death attributed to a
novel coronavirus that recently appeared in Wuhan, China, is announced,
and official news of the first case outside China comes on the 13th,
the day before our first class meeting.
As we start into our work, using chapters from a textbook to put
analytical tools in our shared kit and trying them out on Stuart
Dybek’s short stories, the throughlines that give the semester shape
and momentum begin to take form.
Our developing encounter with the literature provides one of those
throughlines. From Dybek’s dreamlike Chicago neighborhood stories, some
of them written when he was the same age as the students are now, we
move on to Edith Wharton’s novel “The House of Mirth,” a classic
realist tale of an entrepreneurial beauty who must marry to keep her
place in New York’s high society but can’t bring herself to choose
among the available options. She’s caught between working the system
and the notion that there has to be something more than working the
system. Then comes Junot Diaz’s “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,”
which despite its college setting will be a stretch for many students,
who have to reckon with Spanglish, Elvish and a slippery narrator whose
obsession with his own manhood provides the key to the story he tells
about his heroically abject frenemy, Oscar.
The community of inquiry in the classroom takes shape as we grapple
with these texts. Especially in a class organized around discussion,
it’s the level of the floor, not the ceiling, that most dictates the
strength of the group. Even if you get lucky and have two or three
great English students in a class, they can’t carry a weak group, and
it’s more likely that the gap between the standouts and the rest will
breed resentment. The capability and willingness of the typical student
in the room sets the tone, and I have nothing to complain about there.
It’s a good group, competent and willing. The prevailing norm where I
teach is that students take the work seriously, want to do it well, and
find ways to be interested in it. I don’t take any of this for granted,
and I don’t ever lose sight of the fact that it makes my job much more
satisfying.
My role includes framing our analytical tasks, putting tools in our
shared tool kit and demonstrating their use, and modeling an attitude
that balances purpose and openness. Attending to the nuts and bolts of
my own technique means asking “if ... then” questions to help knit
together interpretive threads (“If we accept Nate’s point about X, then
what do we do with Grace’s point about Y?”), using the more inviting
“and” rather than the forbidding “but” when we stress-test an argument
(“I hear several voices saying X about Chapter 4, and now we need to
figure out how that applies to Chapter 5, which on the face of it
doesn’t seem to support that reading”), and otherwise making sure we
get all the juice out of what everyone has to say.
One way I can feel myself getting older is that I am gentler and less
forbidding with my students than I used to be. My attitude has shifted
over the years from “We all die alone” toward “One for all and all for
one,” in part because my own kids are now the age of my students, whose
inner lives paradoxically seem a little less opaque to me now than they
did when I was closer to them in age. Like a parody of an Italian
American man of middle years, I find myself thinking, “Hey, they’re
basically good kids.” And they are basically good kids — typically more
diligent and dutiful than I was at their age, and, despite being on
average a lot richer than I was, less carefree and optimistic.
The freshmen in Lit Core belong to a club that the 18-year-old me would
not have been invited to join. As a college applicant I had uneven
grades, displayed little sign of enterprise or accomplishment, needed
financial aid and had no legal extracurriculars to speak of. And yet I
was still admitted to a number of well-respected schools that could
provide me with a fine education, name-brand prestige and connections,
and a sufficient push toward a calling and a viable middle-class life.
Transported to the present, that 18-year-old me would get slaughtered
in the ramped-up competition for spots in the entering classes of
selective — or even not-so-selective — colleges and universities.
Reducing education to vocational training is a mistake, and to dismiss
“liberal arts degrees” as impractical because there’s no job called
“English” or “history” is to misunderstand how education shapes a life.
The freshmen arriving in Lit Core have for the most part aced
adolescence: earned top grades across the board, as well as honors and
AP credits; piled up credentials via arts, sports and clubs; started a
soup kitchen or raised money to fight cancer; and in a hundred other
ways demonstrated achievement and potential — including moving heaven
and earth to achieve high scores on standardized tests that don’t tell
us much about them that we couldn’t have guessed from their Zip code
and parents’ incomes. Their presence in my classroom is typically the
culmination of a decade-long campaign to hack and claw through a
grueling, perverse and unfair admissions process that wastes much of
the effort and resources that both applicants and admissions officers
put into it. The system’s broken enough that something resembling
arranged marriage would be much more efficient and probably produce
outcomes that are just as good or better.
And, at least from my perspective as a former undergraduate of the
1980s, the titanic additional quantities of time, capital, strategic
maneuver and worry expended by families to get students into today’s
college classroom don’t produce a better result. The quality of what
happens in the classroom may be a little better than before in some
general ways and a little worse in some English-specific ones (fewer
people in the room read a lot of books), but on balance it’s probably a
wash.
The students stake out their roles in classroom discussions. Some take
the lead and others react, some talk about what they understand and
others about what they don’t get, some ask questions and some answer
them. I encourage all this variety of approaches because it makes for
richer discussions. As they say in the world of boxing, styles make
fights.
Individual personalities start to emerge. Marshall, who usually sits
far to my left, comes out swinging. In early class meetings he raises
his hand when others are still hesitating, and he doesn’t fall into the
trap of trying to guess what I want and giving it to me. He’s willing
to try out ideas and admit to perplexity, to treat our conversation
like the workshop it is. He’ll say something like “I don’t know exactly
what this means,” and then he’ll give us something to chew on: “It
seems like the old lady controls everything, because when she stops
drowning cats the men go wild and the neighborhood falls apart.” A
varsity hockey player enrolled in the School of Management, he comes on
as a regular guy who doesn’t think of himself as a literary
intellectual but happens to think this stuff is interesting. He cools
off a bit as the semester goes on and others begin asserting
themselves, but his interpretive gameness helps get us going at the
outset, when it matters most.
Mina, who sits midway back to my right, takes a couple of weeks to get
warmed up, and she tends to wait to speak until we’ve wrestled with a
topic for a while. Her comments are often fully formed interpretations:
I see this and this and this detail, she’ll say, and I connect them to
this theme we’ve been talking about, and here’s how a key passage we
talked about supports my point, and then here’s another passage that we
haven’t talked about yet that looks like it doesn’t fit what I’m
arguing, but if you look at it this way you can see that it does. When
she has weighed in on a topic, it feels like we’re done with it.
Sometimes I catch other students nodding along as Mina speaks or
shaking their heads appreciatively when she’s done, like guitar freaks
absorbing a monster solo, and some are plainly intimidated by her. But
there’s nothing otherworldly about her chops. She does the reading, she
pays attention to what others say, she uses the tools we’ve put in the
toolbox to build sound analyses. It’s not casual brilliance; it’s
resourcefulness, preparation, clarity. She’s a virtuoso because she
practices, not because the muses anointed her with miraculous talent. I
remind the class to take notes on what other students say, not just on
what I say. “It doesn’t get more insightful just because I repeat it,”
I tell them. “Your peers have things to say that you will want to
remember — when it’s time for the final, and beyond.”
My insistence that all students participate in class discussions isn’t
just some kind of touchy-feely inclusiveness, nor is my insistence that
they bring the reading in hard copy and shut off all electronic devices
some kind of aggressive old-fashionedness. Rather, it’s a recognition
that the class works better for everyone if we’re not dragging along
silent or distracted partners, and of what’s special and valuable about
what we’re doing. Students are essentially paying for two things in a
humanities class: the admissions process that produces the students in
the room, and the hiring and promotion process that produces the
teacher. Everything else they can get at home, online: They can do the
reading, study scholarship about the writers and their eras, post
opinions and even watch lectures about literature (most of which are
bad, so far, but if you dig you can find substantive ones, and in time
there will be more).
What happens in the classroom — humans paying attention to books and
one another — may seem rudimentary to a fault, but it’s a vanishingly
rare and precious experience. Most of the people in the room will never
again gather regularly with other people to think deeply about
something they have all read, uninterrupted for 75 whole minutes by
text messages, emails, buzzes, beeps, dings, klaxons, flashing lights,
tempting links, breaking news alerts or GIFs of naked mole rats dancing.
Our discussions usually start with observations, which we build into
analytical arguments. For instance, in a conversation about diction —
the choice of particular words and phrases to tell a story — in “The
House of Mirth,” some students notice recurring business talk about
credit, speculation, interest and capital in Wharton’s account of Lily
Bart’s career in New York’s high-society marriage market. Others notice
hunting and military imagery — “She began to cut the pages of a novel,
tranquilly studying her prey through downcast lashes while she
organized a method of attack” — and the language of natural science
with which the novel explains Lily’s increasingly desperate social
situation: She’s compared to a “waterplant in the flux of the tides”
and a “sea-anemone torn from the rock.” Seeking a larger pattern, we
begin to see a tension between the efforts of Lily the
entrepreneur-warrior-hunter to actively determine the course of her own
life and the extent to which she’s portrayed as passively in the tidal
grip of large impersonal forces. We don’t all agree on which of those
forces might be most powerful. Money? Desire? Different social
expectations for women and men? But we don’t have to agree. We’re
trying to understand how the text thinks and works, what kind of
readers it asks us to be, the tools and opportunities it gives us to
make meaning.
This is not an esoteric skill reserved for the privileged few who can
afford to indulge themselves in enhancing their enjoyment of made-up
stories. Reducing education to vocational training is a mistake, and to
dismiss “liberal arts degrees” as impractical because there’s no job
called “English” or “history” is to misunderstand how education shapes
a life (and also to misunderstand the liberal arts, which include
science and math), but college does cost a lot, and you do need to make
a living when you get out. Apart from the degree as a credential and
the way that college embeds you in a network and perhaps even does you
some good as a human being, what you actually learn how to do there has
become essential to competing in the postindustrial job market.
Whatever your major, a college degree indicates that you are good at
learning, an ever-more-important meta-skill as careers increasingly
feature many different jobs rather than long-term stable ones. And the
degree indicates that you can assimilate and organize complicated
bodies of information, analyze that information to create outcomes that
have value to others, and convey that analysis with purpose and clarity.
Such analysis can of course lead to making and doing things, but
performing the analysis is itself an act of making and doing. Whether
you honed these fundamental skills in the study of foreign policy or
Jacobean revenge tragedies or the solar system is usually secondary,
and less important than in what company you did the honing. What
matters most is that you pursued training in the craft of mastering
complexity, which you can apply in fields from advertising to zoo
management.
So, no, “because it makes your life more, like, beautiful, man” may not
be a good enough reason all on its own to study literature (though, in
fact, such study does significantly increase your capacity to process
truth and beauty). This strikes me as a better one: Literature offers
not only a bottomless repository of ideas — inspiring, awful, useful,
funny, hateful, perplexing, terrifying, thrilling, generative,
ever-multiplying ideas — but also endless opportunity to refine your
analytical chops in an encounter with some of the most complex
artifacts our species is capable of producing. It’s at least
anecdotally interesting that the last three governors of the state
where I live and teach have all been English majors (Charlie Baker,
Deval Patrick, Mitt Romney) and of the three before them one majored in
American studies (Jane Swift) and another in classics (Bill Weld).
We come out of spring break with momentum built up and the end of the
semester swinging into view up ahead. A semester is like a shuttle
flight in that it doesn’t have much middle. You’re taking off and
reaching altitude and getting settled in, and suddenly it’s time to put
up tray tables and return seat backs to the upright position in
preparation for landing. This time, it’s an emergency landing on a
remote stretch of highway. The virus has been making its way to us in
great leaps, but we’ve been slow to react to its approach. Then, all of
a sudden, it’s among us, and the university moves courses online and
closes dorms. There’s a scrambling pause during which most students
hustle home, a few who remain on campus go to ground in university
housing specially prepared for them, and faculty get up to speed on the
art of Zoom. Then we’re back at it again.
Everyone’s trying extra-hard to be accommodating, friendly and engaged,
and the students are touchingly relieved to still be in school. But
it’s different, and not in a good way. I realize just how much my
ability to manage a productive conversation depends on physical cues. I
rely on reading faces and body language to know who’s getting it, who’s
into it, who could use a nudge, whether we’re ready to move on to the
next thing or should gnaw on the current problem a little longer. And
in modeling how to take an interest in something and channel that
interest into rigor, I use the form of my physical attitude to express
the content of the intellectual attitude I want the students to try
out. How I carry myself in the actual room — how I use posture and
gesture and other aspects of presence to convey my own thought process
and confusion and pleasure and purpose and confidence — does a lot of
the work of showing how I carry myself as a student of literature.
Pick your cliche for discussing literature on Zoom — especially with 35
participants, which forces me to toggle between two screens.
Slow-dancing in hazmat suits comes to mind. So does turning around an
aircraft carrier, because it seems to take forever to do things online
that in person could be done with a quick glance around the room, like
determining who among the students whose hands are raised wants to
respond to what another student just said. And it’s not just that the
tiny rectangles on the screen don’t convey enough information; they
also convey bad information, false positives. Is that disinterest I’m
seeing? Skepticism? Pixelation? Or just the inherent physical and
emotional flattening effect of the camera? I don’t score boxing matches
if I’m not at ringside, because on TV it’s much more difficult to gauge
the effect of punches and even to tell which of them land truly flush.
I cut some texts from the syllabus and add brief informal writing
assignments to help make up for the added difficulty of carrying on a
conversation. I could try further adjustments to mitigate the
disembodied impersonality of being online — splitting the class into
breakout rooms on Zoom, employing the social e-reader platform Perusall
to let them collaborate in marking up the reading, running chats and
other such forums, trying out alternatives to Zoom — though I’m not
convinced any of it would make that much of a difference.
Moving online during the pandemic has afforded me insight into what I
do as a teacher. In addition to conveying skills and content, I figure
out who’s in the room, where they’re coming from and what they can do
and what they’re interested in doing, and I try to strike a balance
between helping them reach extant goals and showing them some new
things to aspire to. It’s easier to see that process operating in
advanced classes, where students are more likely to have already
defined objectives for themselves, but it happens even in a required
freshman literature class. Over time I’ve come to appreciate more
deeply the importance of the one-on-one teaching that happens in office
hours, hanging around before and after class, on email, and in my
responses to drafts and papers, but even in meetings of the full class
the one-on-one dynamics move beneath the surface of the collaborative
effort. I’m trying to help each student find a way to go from where
they are to where they want to get to, and often that means introducing
them to destinations they did not have in mind before they signed up
for the class.
Did my students get what they came for, or at least what I wanted them
to get out of the class? Are they ready — or readier than they were —
to swim in the sea of language in our stormy times?
Most of that is harder to do on Zoom (and also in person when masked
and socially distanced), but it’s not impossible. Some one-on-one
aspects of teaching actually become easier when we move online, like
conversations during office hours, which I now hold at all times of the
day and evening, whenever students want to talk. The pandemic also
generates added incentive for all to make sure that meaningful teaching
and learning does continue to happen. Students and their bill-paying
parents start asking, reasonably enough, whether online college is
worth the high price they pay for college in person; and as the economy
tanks in the spring, the post-college prospects of graduates look even
grimmer than they did in January.
Graduating seniors may be even more freaked out by the pandemic than
freshmen. Not only has the big finish of their college careers
disappeared in a cloud of acrid smoke, but so have many of the
entry-level jobs for which they were hoping to compete. Seniors send me
wry, fatalistic updates from their old bedrooms, to which they have
retreated without much prospect of moving on to what they had
previously imagined as exciting new chapters in their lives as
independent adults. They’re feeling less like entrepreneurs, warriors
or hunters and more like waterplants than ever.
Through late March and April and into early May, students show up on
Zoom from their bedrooms and basements, from the kitchen table with a
parent or sibling or roommate passing through in the background on the
way to the refrigerator. A couple of them who stay on campus hunker
down in eerily isolated dorm rooms to which the university has assigned
them, some get sick and recover and come back, several take advantage
of the university’s grade-amnesty offer and switch to pass-fail for the
semester. But, except for two who drop the class, they all keep showing
up, and we get on with our work.
We finish “Oscar Wao” and move on to a final unit of comparative
readings: Joan Didion and Hunter S. Thompson on the counterculture,
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jack London on outsiders in the city, Flannery
O’Connor and Vladimir Nabokov on weird journeys. The students write and
rewrite papers. Both the increased professionalism and the heightened
anxiety of freshmen these days lead to plenty of action before a paper
gets turned in. Many more students than in the past ask me questions
about the assignment, try out ideas or send me a draft. Even if some
just want reassurance, all this iteration tends to head off disasters
and produce more thought-through arguments. A handful of students in
the class decide to major or minor in English, but for many this is
their one experience of a college literature class.
Did they get what they came for, or at least what I wanted them to get
out of it? Are they ready — or readier than they were — to swim in the
sea of language in our stormy times? It can take advanced close-reading
skills to parse the super-compressed meanings of dueling slogans like
“black lives matter” and “all lives matter” or the familiar sequence of
what Anthony Fauci said, what the president’s free-form Twitter poem
with 17th-century capitalization said about what Fauci said, what Fauci
said and didn’t say about what the president said, and how all manner
of commentators gloss the meaning of what they said. Are the students
more prepared for meaningful employment, citizenship, difficulty and
joy because they’ve arrived at a deeper understanding of the struggles
of Dybek’s neighborhood kids navigating the passage to the wider world,
Wharton’s warrior-waterplant or Diaz’s doomed nerd idealist and his
toxic amanuensis?
I think so. I hope so. Lit Core online is less efficient, energetic,
fun, humane and rewarding than it is in person. We get less done, and
there’s more of a sense of just getting through it. But the essence of
the class and why it matters hasn’t changed. The building of analytical
skills in class discussions and in writing and revising papers, the
routine of putting tools in the kit and testing their use, the
mechanics of trial and error and reinforced practice — that’s all still
happening. Reading through the pile of papers and take-home finals as I
do my grading at the end of the semester, I can see that students are
making interpretive arguments about meaning founded on literary
evidence better than they did in January.
Like bars, libraries and boxing gyms, school is at once different in
every incarnation and the same everywhere. Just as every library is an
outpost of the Master Library of All Time and Space, every bar a
sweetly imperfect copy of the One True Universal Bar, and every boxing
gym an avatar of the Mystical Body of Boxing Gyms, every school I’ve
ever been to — from the university where I teach to a kindergarten in
an orphanage in Huangshi, China — is at once a unique place and a
branch office of a world-spanning enterprise called School. In person
or online, plague or no plague, Lit Core is school, and school in any
substantive form is infinitely better than none at all. I do not labor
under the delusion that I’m an essential worker, so I’m resigned to
teaching online until the pandemic abates to the point that in-person
college does not pose an unreasonable risk to public health. But the
work still feels essential — and, though I know better, timeless.
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