I was teaching my American Culture Kakuron class yesterday, covering American universities in general and my experiences at UCSD and UM in particular, when a student asked me what was my best memory from university. I immediately told him that the TGIF festivals put on by UCSD after classes on Friday in my first year, with free beer and pizza and live music on the grassy knolls in front of the gymnasium, cause I could run around in the golden late afternoon southern California sunlight, laughing with friends, looking at girls, and generally feeling full of youth and life, etc. (I didn't go into all that detail in class!)... and then I asked the student what was his best memory at our university. And he looked down and thought, and then said he doesn't really have any because for most of his first two years here, classes were online, and his words punched me and made me really see the students, sitting there mostly attentively in their anti-virus masks, and I felt so sorry for them for not being able to enjoy their university lives fully freely as before, laughing and talking with friends, partying, playing, studying together openly etc....
Too often I think of things from my point of view, how difficult it is to teach online (when we were doing that), how uncomfortable it is wearing masks while teaching (I often have to go out into the hallway to blow my nose in the middle of classes), how nervous it makes me to be around so many vigorous young people during a pandemic, and how strange it seems when I rarely see their faces when they take a drink or something... But for the poor students, this must really be an awful time, their youths being straightened if not blighted by all this...
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
Categories |