Reflection
Yesterday I closed the book on my thirtieth year of teaching, and, like every other year, it is forcing me to reflect on what the previous ten months have meant and the effects they have had. Most years, I fall into a melancholy, mostly thinking of the seniors that have graduated and I may very well never see again, and how I will miss the daily interactions with my students that simultaneously energize and exhaust me. After the hybrid hot mess of 2020-2021 that we somehow duct taped into a leaky raft that barely got us to shore, we all had higher hopes for 2021-2022. It turns out, despite a relative return to normal, this year brought its own challenges that may have been worse. Don’t get me wrong. Back in person was a breath of air (I can’t say fresh air because we were still in masks), and having everyone’s partial faces all in the same room was wonderful. And as the year went on, we seemed to get ...