Dear Student: Kindly Advise.
By Molly Appel
Note from the author:
As educators, we are world-builders. A class is a micro-universe made of community norms, philosophical cosmologies, and intellectual terrain. COVID-19 burned away the fiction that these worlds are sealed away from other worlds once we close the door to the classroom. An educator invested in critical pedagogy would tell us that our classrooms were always multiverses, it’s just that now they’ve gotten harder to ignore.
There was a lot of amazing education that happened in the COVID-19 semester of fall 2020. This is because we – students and teachers – are so deeply invested in these educations, we committed ourselves to performing positivity and normalcy. It worked. But the problem is that the discourse of this performance is also the currency of an education system built to instrumentalize and erase difference – to sustain racial capitalism as our only way to live. As one of my students put it so beautifully: “we are all suffering under an industrialized system that doesn’t pause for the human parts of ourselves.”
My greatest fear as a professor is not that students will no longer achieve academic excellence in virtual conditions. My greatest fear is that these COVID-19 conditions will continue to render invisible the cost of that excellence, and the poignant, painful, beautiful, heroic humanity that makes such academic excellence possible.
Poetry is the ultimate technology for counteracting silence, invisibility, and mechanization. And so I needed to process this semester in the form of a poem. I needed The Odyssey, too – though I admit that the appearance of Homer’s characters as my muses took me a bit by surprise. I guess I needed the mythology that even the ultimate antihero, lost in time and space, distanced from his loved ones, the architect and victim of his tragedies, makes it home.
This poem is an act of gratitude for every student who shared something of their lives with me beyond the screen. Thank you for your insistent humanity. Thank you to the patitos, who generously read this poem prior to my sharing it with anyone else. You are why any of this, why all of this, matters.
“Dear Student: Kindly Advise.”
By Molly Appel
“Nobody, friends” – Polyphemus bellowed back from his cave –
“Nobody’s killing me now by fraud and not by force!”
“If you’re alone,” his friends boomed back at once,
“and nobody’s trying to overpower you now – look,
it must be plague sent here by mighty Zeus
and there’s no escape from that.”
The Odyssey. Book 9: 454-460. Translation by Robert Fagles
I have never seen your face.
You’ve taken shape in the words you have used
to sign off each of the thirty emails you sent me.
I have so many questions for the name on my screen.
This time, would you kindly advise?
Are these words a ritual that steadies your bow?
Is this refrain your oar against these crowning breakers?
Kindness, I can offer. Advice? I have none.
Do you truly see me as a seasoned navigator of this unknown ocean?
Yes, you can turn in the assignment late.
No, there will not be any penalty
because the Time we once trusted to mark our commitments
must now be threaded on different terms.
How do I steer toward a “normal semester”
when rage and fear
at belching pundits and devouring legislators,
who find easy prey in students and educators,
thunder around my every stroke?
Yes, you can keep your camera off.
No, I won’t deduct from your “class participation”
if the only quiet place you can join our meeting from
is your bedroom closet
so you only add your voice by typing in the chat
while draped by your unused prom dress.
What do I do for the trauma
that whispers to me from inside your questions?
How do I hold back from crying out,
“please give me the email and phone number
of the educators who instilled this panic in you”
and keep my empathy for colleagues
who have been thrown off course
as dramatically as I have?
Yes, all of our meetings are recorded.
No, making up the exit ticket
is not as important as you taking a nap
because your whole family got COVID
and your sister kept you up all night because she was unable to breathe.
How do I respond when during my office hours
you tell me that both grandparents have died
and your mom cannot cope with her grief
so you must make all funeral arrangements across two countries
alone
and after taking her, too, to the hospital,
because she cannot cope with her grief
you are left to care for your baby brother
alone
and since you’ve been doing your assignments when he’s asleep at 2AM
you just want to make sure your grades are okay?
Where can I find the right words
when “You are all caught up and have an A”
are laughably, monstrously inadequate?
Yes,
after our meetings I often crumble into weeping,
treading water between exhaustion and gratitude.
No,
I have not finished grading your assignment
because when I made it, I did not yet know
that grading would start to feel like surveillance,
and in my horror
I would shut down completely for days at a time
before “fight” kicked back in over “flight.”
How do I cope with so much dissonance
and swollen absence?
When you hear me greet you by your name
do you know that I am reaching out to you,
my fingers spread across the unbreakable glass of the wine-dark mirrors
of our shipwrecked lives?
Has it been ten months or twenty years?
Kindly advise.
Photo/Molly Appel.
Molly Appel is an Assistant Professor of English at Nevada State College. She specializes in Latinx and Latin American literature, focusing on how these works of literature have been a space of pedagogical thinking and practice for human rights and social justice. She has been an educator for 13 years, teaching elementary school, high school, and college. You can see more of her writing in Chiricú Journal, Comparative Literature Studies, HASTAC.org, the Scholar at Large blog series on Interfolio, and forthcoming in American Literatures and Teaching Literature and Writing in Prisons. Find her on Twitter: @MollyAppel.
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