Yesterday was the last class of the semester, wrapping up my first year teaching at SAIC. I remember from my student days that some classes had a particular combination of personalities and pedagogy that created some kind of emergent magic, an alchemy where the class came together to be something bigger than the sum of its parts. What an absurd gift to find myself on the teaching side of that magic. This semester’s class was something really special. We laughed together, we got weepy together, we sang Tiny Dancer at the top of our lungs together! To explain:
The final project assignment was to make a new mini comic and self-publish it in an edition of 20: one for my archives, one for the special collection library, one to give to each of their classmates, and a few leftover to give to friends or sell at Quimby’s. The last day of class is a celebration, a book launch event where we eat snacks, read the books out loud, and discuss. Honestly I’m pretty mad that you all can’t read these in full, there were some spectacular comics that came out of this group! One of the most ambitious books of the semester was “Two Invisible Friends in 50,000 Years of Darkness,” a 50 page (!) shaggy dog story about friendship and quiet moments of intimacy and celebratory moments of joy, full of humor and tenderness, from a performance student who had never made a comic before and (to the world’s detriment) might never again. One vignette has the two friends laying on a trampoline singing “Tiny Dancer,” and when I got to that scene, everyone joined in!
What a class! I mean, look at the dedication a student wrote on the last page of their book!
I accidentally timed the class perfectly, ending our readings and discussions and my closing ritual at exactly class dismissal, but everyone stayed late to sign each other’s books and make plans to stay in touch. I genuinely hope the do, and I think they will.
After class I joined a protest with my union AICWU, rallying support for a more fair contract for non-tenure track faculty, then met up with a fellow NTT faculty friend. We talked about all the contradictions and challenges and joys of teaching, whether or not we feel called to teach, how meaningful it is to give everything we do to our students after having had less-than-supportive academic mentors ourselves, the financial precarity of NTT labor at SAIC, the urgency of this moment of student protests against genocide in Palestine (my friend was one of the faculty who were arrested with her students last weekend when the museum called the cops on the students’ nonviolent encampment), and on and on. It is complex, and the two of us were coming at it with similar hearts and different circumstances. I was so grateful to end my semester in that moment with her.
I feel deep in reflection about this moment in ways I can’t fully articulate yet. I never imagined myself as an educator, and also I love it. I am so honored to be given the opportunity to earn the trust of a groups of young artists every semester, and called to live up to the trust that they place in me to support them as they grow. I am unimaginably lucky, and will do everything I can to earn the luck that I have received. As long as the SAIC will have me I’ll be there, grinning like a goober and singing at the top of my lungs.