Ebbing Forward, Still, as Story

thoughts on the students we leave behind, when we leave teaching

“Ebbing Forward,” Beth Kephart, Cyanotype

You don’t know who you will now not know, and that’s the worst part of leaving teaching.

The stories that will never be confided in you. The talent you won’t witness as it cracks and stalks and blooms. The questions you won’t answer because there is no one near to ask them. The resurrection of your youth, because of the ways in which, when the twelve or the ten or the eighteen of them (more young women than young men, more seniors than freshmen, the occasional graduate student, the infrequent auditor with the unexpected apprehensions) sit at that table in their chairs before you, you remember how it felt to love and hurt and want and need and still be in the earliest chapters of your own becoming.

At the University of Pennsylvania, where I taught memoir and sometimes young adult literature as an adjunct for many years, the old wooden windows would jam when I wanted fresh air, and the PC computer system would mystify me, and there was always, in a backpack I couldn’t quite place, the smell of an overripened banana. I’d obsessively configure and quietly rehearse every single teaching hour and nothing ever went according to plan. The best writers were rarely who they thought they were. The reading lists—meticulously mod, so ambitiously hip—would be overruled, in a few weeks’ time, in favor of the classics. The small-group work would engender rivalry instead of friendship, laughter instead of analysis, too much praise or too much critique and never the balance I had imagined.

This is what I loved about it. This was the jolt of the adventure. With their newly green hair and their panda pajama bottoms and their off-color jokes, the students were my responsibility and my privilege. In every minute that I stood or paced or sat among them, in every lecture I delivered, in every encouragement and challenge, in every quieting of the loudest voices so that the softest voices might rise: it mattered. Who I was before and after class mattered as much as who I was in the prescribed hours. How I small talked and how I big talked. How I signed my emails, how I deflected boredom in the Zoom room, whether they called me Professor Kephart or Prof or just simply (and increasingly toward the end) Beth.

The job was this job: earning the right to teach them.

My first class had a less-than-boastworthy number of enrolled students, and at the close of each week there was one fewer. We held, at last, at a passable number. We held, and how essential we finally became, in all our mutual, exculpatory newness.

But the semesters that followed grew in enrollment and in din. Sometimes, thanks to the limited number of chairs in the room, I taught entire seasons never sitting down until one student or another took some pity. Sometimes I’d arrive thirty minutes too soon, certain that, following the charged explorations from the previous week, no one would be returning. There was never a perfect semester, never any moment that I was not on high alert, but there were, this is an absolute, the profound ways in which the students proved themselves unafraid to speak, to risk, to question, to pick up the pen, or the keyboard, and try again.

I knew when it was time to go. I knew because my body told me. The walk to and from the Penn campus from the Thirtieth Street Station felt longer and longer in my bones. My reading lists weren’t setting the tempo I desired. The comments I wrote on the weekly assignments began to echo comments I had once written, when such words were new to me. The angst of earning my place in that classroom had begun to outweigh the joy.

On the final day of my final class, I stood among my students. We’d gone outside, we’d removed our Covid masks, we were seeing each other for the last time, and also newly. I watched them through tears. I received their grace, I implored them to keep writing and keep reading. Around the circle we went with our goodbyes, and then around the circle a second time—stalks and blooms, the scattered husks of seeds.

When we leave the classrooms that held and taught us, we say goodbye to the students we won’t meet, to the possibilities we can’t imagine. We make room for other teachers and for more novel reading lists. We make room for other friendships, other insights. We recognize that it’s beyond us now, it is our history, though every now and again my phone will ring, and there one of them is—their voice, their laugh, and their secrets ebbing forward, still, as story.

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Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News: A Philadelphia Story, received a Booklist star. Caroline Leavitt and I talked about the book’s making here.

My first book on the writing of memoir, Handling the Truth, won a Books for a Better Life Award shortly after its publication in 2013. I’ve continued to write books about the making of true stories ever since, working with my husband to create workbooks, prompt-rich books, and suggested approaches to the page. A guide to those resources, along with a link to my essay collection You Are Not Vanished Here (illustrated by William Sulit) can be found here.

Join me for a Cleaver master class, “Transcending the Tumult: Write Right Now,” July 27, registration here.

Join me for an in-person writing workshop in September, through Maine Media.