Don’t we feel an inner protest when a student interrupts our reading… What if our interruptions are in fact our opportunities… Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out

The first fall I taught classes I had only been out of HU for 8 months. I walked into that room with all the inocence of Adam before Eve offered him the fruit.

I lie. I lost my innocence the summer before when a student turned in his final exam to me with three Cuban cigars. I should’ve failed him and not accepted his gift. Instead, I accepted the cigars and gave him the D- he was going to get anyway.

Memphis… those were the days when T would take reporters on trips to London, Paris, Belfast, Lima, Cuzco. She was traipsing over the ruins of Machu Picchu, as I was studying for my MA exams. On those days of second bachelorhood, I would wander over to the Christian Student Center.

Graduate-Undergraduate Student relationships on any given campus are strange:
“Dude, Jmy, I just sooo want to go out and hit a bar or two with you and watch you pick up chicks… You’d be such the ladies man… That’d be so much fun, dude… We’d get totally wasted!” Said a Frat-President student of mine once.
^{In the interest of being honest with my readers, my idea of Hell is a self-important frat-boy serving as my Virgil as he stumbles me through a binger studying my moves as I try to score.}

The rhythm of Graduate students is rather different than the rest of academia. They no longer worry about Calculus or Intro to Poli Sci or O-Chem; instead, they worry about giving and grading Calculus, Poli Sci or O-Chem tests and whether or not the other schmoes in the program are going to “steal” their brilliant study session insight to impress the prof. They haven’t yet mastered the vocabulary of their intended profession, but like an infant fascinated by a new word jostling its way in between their palate and tongue they pepper their conversation with half-grasped sesquipedalias. There is no place for Graduate students except the coffee shop (gearing up for class), the classroom (talking trash), or the bar (decompressing and finally correctly pronouncing deterritorialization).

Graduate students are even less at home in a Christian Student Center. The Graduate student who has already professed before God, family and country his love to a woman and sealed this betrothal with a band of gold (purity, eternity, malleability) is simply anathema. Not only is there the obligatory faith crisis, or at least, the haughty presumption that others don’t live an examined faith… if you’ve never read Foucault, how could your life be examined? But also, by having a mate these Graduate students find themselves on the other side of the neurotic courtship rituals of the histrionically repressed 21 year-olds who haunt the halls of Christian Student Centers.

With the hindsight of time… and several good evangelism seminars later, I now realize I should’ve told him to go to the Christian Student Center. But, I didn’t. I only listened… and counseled him to apologize to his girlfriend.

That fall I had a really nice heritage speaker in my class. He was a clean-cut, eager-beaver Cuban who could remember his Grandma speaking Spanish to him growing up, but he’d lost his mother tongue in the vagaries of elementary school. Few persons are as eager to learn as those who’ve had a few years of college and didn’t finish because the exigencies of life called them away to menial jobs. He had just left the military; done his duty in Iraq, and a few more years for good measure. A business degree was his ticket out, and Spanish the keys to the kingdom. He was gonna make something of his life; forget the painful divorce from his military wife; and make a safe-place for his beautiful five year-old boy.
^{I’ve never been one to keep kids out of my classroom. Teaching at urban, commuter campuses, where a good 30-50% of your student body is non-traditional and well over 50% of the entire student body works 3/4 to full time jobs, the ocassional child-care snafu is to be expected. And, if the child is well-behaved and doesn’t interrupt, I have no problem with them coloring in the corner. His kid had come once or twice.}

We were reviewing the subjunctive for the test and he was clearly not in the same room as the rest of us. At the end of class, he fumbled with his bookbag as I gathered my material and we entered the hallway together. I forget how we ended up on the floor, but there we were on the floor, in the hall, as the entire city walked by and stared at this 35 year-old man sobbing on the shoulder of his 23 year-old T.A. He’d pissed pus the day before and was freaked out. He’d gone over to his girlfriend’s that night and cussed her out. And now he was spent. The bitch of it all, he said, was that she was a great girl, great with his boy, and that he really liked her. But he was now convinced that she must be a ho who had been cheating on him. She had, he belived, marked him with this thing that even during his most hedonistic days of military service had never touched him. As we talked, I found out that they’d been seeing each other for a while, but only sleeping together for about 2 weeks. I also learned that between his divorce and the new Ms. Right, turned über-hussy, he’d been no second virgin… which is to say, things had only been exclusive once she’d turned down the sheets.

At that time, I don’t think I knew the full etiology of the disease… that is, the time between contact and symptom. But I told him that he shouldn’t jump to conclusions… and that, in fact, if he was as active as he proclaimed, he could’ve gotten it from someone else. That what he needed to do was see a doctor to figure out what it was and to apologize to her for the way he treated her.

I don’t know if he indeed got slapped with the clamp, he never told me. He did, however, tell me that the doctor said that he could’ve gotten it from someone else and that she and he had both been to the doctor and even been to some counseling and that things were better than ever.

He knew I was a Christian… and I may have said that I would pray for him; I really don’t remember. But that was the extent of my “witnessing” to him.
^{Today, Campus Crusade for Professors came knocking at my door and we chatted for a little while. He came by to make the hard sell… and was glad that I was a believer. He would’ve been disappointed in me had I told him this story.}

These opportunities don’t come up as often and as obvious as this one. Maybe it’s cuz I haven’t been looking… maybe it’s because I’ve had, since then, one too many crazy students stalk me and ply me with gifts I don’t want. And it’s not that life doesn’t happen and hit the fan and come out the other side splattered against the wall in Christian schools… but here in this concrete jungle, in the fascist architecture of my building, constructed in the 1960s to be a fortress and keep the Civil Rioting of this chocolate city out in the streets, the students who interrupt my day are Christian and non-Christian alike; they are black, brown, yellow, white, and red; Subcontinental Indians, Pakistani, Eastern European, Chinese, Korean, and from almost every State in the Union. Some are Christian and have had encounters with vitriolic atheists, others deal with Christian students informing them that they are numbered among the damned for questioning gender.

They pass through my classroom… both of us busy with school and work and family. And sometimes we sit on floor in the hall and talk about life.

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