My students made me cry.

Yesterday, my students almost made me cry. Imagine the scene: I'm all alone in a nearly-deserted university building, huddled under my knit shawl in an empty classroom, rain softly lashing the windows, Zoom screen glowing brightly, very few student cameras turned on. I've implored them, sternly reminded them, cajoled them into turning on their cameras, but only a brave few actually do. I teach 5.5 hours on Wednesdays, so imagine also how stiff my back and neck are by the end of the day. Imagine me like this, then imagine what these students could possibly do to make me cry. 

These were first-year students, 18, maybe 19 years old. Ensconced in their various student residences, homes, apartments. Unreliable internet, roommates, siblings, the occasional cat. It's English class towards the end of the semester, and at this point a quarter, maybe a third of students are logging in to the Zoom classes. It irritates me, but I get it. In this class, we practice reading and listening comprehension, a little speaking, a little writing. When everyone in the class has done their homework, I consider it a miracle. Mostly, it's just me trying to squeeze water from the proverbial stone, gesticulating wildly on camera to a bunch of little blacked-out squares, articulating clearly, doing anything to elicit any reaction or sign of life. Yet still, yesterday, I nearly had to turn off my camera from the building pressure in my heart and the throbbing at my temples. 

By chance, I chose a speaking activity from the pre-prepared booklet we all use in this course that prompted the students to talk about the educational system. Do they think it functions well? What would they change? Do they think teachers are trained properly? (I took that question personally given that according to the French Ministry of Education, I'm qualified to teach kids aged 12-18. Or else, I'm good at writing university-level literary reflection essays and b.s.-ing my way through translation.) I put them into groups (well, breakout rooms in Zoom), and I also encouraged them to discuss how they've felt the transition from high school to college has been going. Before I even hit "go" on the breakout rooms, I could see someone students smirking. This is France where the chief professional sport is complaining. Obviously they would have things to say. I braced myself for some eye rolling, good old-fashioned venting. Not that I wouldn't have agreed with them.

10 minutes for a breakout group discussion. I answered some emails, prepared the worksheet for the next activity, checked Instagram. Should have gotten the tissues out.

"Welcome back, everyone! Please turn your cameras back on... Who has some thoughts on the educational system?"

A moment of silence, the quiet before the storm.

"Anyone?" 

Silence, a teacher's worst nightmare in a discussion activity.

"I have something, can I speak?"

And the floodgates have opened.

It turns out these brave few students, the ones who still bother to show up to Zoom class in December, are humans with soft, gooey centers. They feel isolated, they feel like they were expected to *poof* become adults in the intervening two months between high school and university, they have too much homework (ok...) and professors who won't listen to them, they can't balance work and social life because they just don't know how, they've never learned to study because subjects came easily to them in high school, and suddenly the expectations are much higher, Zoom is unbelievably depressing, they felt pressured in high school to pick a certain curriculum and then felt trapped by it, they don't see how past experiences (math class) have any relation to the present or future, nobody is teaching them how to prepare their taxes, people are telling them they're foolish for going back to university at age 23, dress codes at school penalize girls and do nothing to remind boys that they ought not objectify women, they've been dealing with anxiety and learning disabilities in an educational system that only thinks about the neurotypical students...

They're reaching their breaking point. And no professor has yet taken the time to ask them, how are you coping?

As I listened to them speak, and as I relayed all my best advice, tips, tricks, know-how, I felt a ball of emotion building in my chest. They were so earnest. They kept speaking in English! They wanted to be taken seriously. I wanted to reach through the screen and hold each student in my arms. I kept reminding them that they aren't alone, that it takes courage to reach out and ask for help, that I am here to help them. And I told them honestly what it's like from the teacher's perspective: we have so many students who lie and abuse the system, that we get jaded and every student becomes a potential exaggerating drama queen. In the 5 years that I've been teaching, I've had baptism-by-fire practice in weeding through the b.s. to reach through to those students who genuinely need a pedagogical push (or just a pep talk!).

Teaching is my purpose in life. It fulfills me and frustrates me, all at once, showing me that I truly care about the people in front of me. I've had jobs where I left the office and didn't think twice about the frantic emails waiting for me in the morning. I never felt motivated in those jobs. I probably didn't work to my potential. But every class is a new chance to connect, to inform, to inspire, to listen, to reach through and make someone's life a little brighter, whether through an emotional discussion about the transition to college or the sudden comprehension of why we use the present perfect. This semester has been challenging, heartbreaking, and joyful, all in one. When we moved to the North, I didn't know if I would even be able to continue teaching at the university. I live for standing in front of a college class and teaching my lesson. (I tell my students this: it doesn't matter what degree you got if you can creatively apply it to the job you want. I have a degree in music. It taught me how to prepare a song, get on a stage, connect with an audience, and convince that audience of my earnest interpretation of the music. Sound like teaching?) But now, I sit hunched over at a desk and talk to black squares. Am I still reaching them? Is there still a connection? What do they even get out of this? Am I doing enough? I suppose that question never goes away, Zoom classes or no.

**

We wrapped up class, and the students hadn't even noticed that we'd gone 5 minutes over time (at lunch time no less!). I hope it's not the last time I have to remind students that it's time to go. I managed to hold myself together, by the way, though barely. I like to think I'm an effective teacher, but I decided that I would make a terrible therapist. This morning, though, I woke up to an email from a student entitled "Therapy." She reached out. I reached someone.

Musings upon a quarantine

It's been a couple of years since I've made use of this medium, but I make no apologies for life lived or intentions diverted. It's not that I haven't had anything to write about, rather that writing and reflection tend to be a bit emotionally fatiguing for me. The novelty of being an expat has lost some of its sheen as well, so what once fascinated a wide-eyed, slightly uncomfortable, cheek-kiss-hating 25-year-old doesn't tend to still phase me as a (still cheek-kiss-hating) 30-year-old. Bref, I finished my master's degree in musicology in Lyon in 2017, taught as an English assistant for two years, Ben and I got married (admit it, you just whispered finally), and we moved down south to Aix-en-Provence. I'm teaching English as a lecturer at the university here, and I somehow got myself involved with yet another master's degree. Something something something about loving pain.

I thought I wanted to be a secondary school teacher, but it turns out, I can't stand kids! But I love to teach, I really think it's my calling. I love standing up in front of a class, giving a lesson, answering questions, imparting wisdom (or whatever other nonsense I can come up with), and connecting with that rather small minority of students whose eyes light up in class, who ask me non-stop questions because their yen to learn is so strong. I love those kids. I want to continue to teach those kids.

Two things. I never was that kid in college. I'm that kid now in grad school (second time over). I was painfully shy in college, I didn't know my worth, and being a music major — a singer — is really bad for your confidence. Musicians can be a real rotten bunch to impressionable young people. I had professors bully me, snicker at me while I was performing in juries, discount me because I dared study abroad, and I've basically been forgotten about by my alma mater because I didn't go on to have a career as an opera singer. Funny thing is, I learned more from that degree in music performance about teaching than I seem to be learning in my pedagogy classes in grad school now. Can you really teach how to connect with an audience? How to engage 60+ kids who would prefer to be on Insta right now, thank you very much.

This brings me to the heart of my sudden surge of writer's inspiration. Teaching and music. I'm a musician and a teacher. I don't teach music. Hah. When I finished my master's degree in musicology, my director urged me to apply to do a doctoral thesis. I grimaced politely and said no thank you. For one thing, it would have meant writing 400-something pages in FRENCH, but also I just simply didn't think I was good enough, bright enough, enough. Music is just a hobby, I said, it's too personal to try to make a career out of. To be very honest, I rarely listen to music. I really hate being asked what my favorite music is. The frank answer is Beethoven, but damn that just sounds so cliché. But I can't listen to the third movement of Beethoven's string quartet no. 15 without crawling into a little hole inside myself and weeping. Something to do with my childhood. My parents, who instilled in me my love of music. The many, many hours a week spent practicing my violin, piano, and voice. The Strauss song Morgen that reminded me of that crystallized moment I spent at dawn at the water's edge on a lake in the Adirondack Mountains, while visiting a boy I'd end up marrying, eight months after a painful breakup, and a week before I left the US to live abroad the first time. The Chopin Prélude Op. 28 No. 15 that I learned in high school, and banged away at for hours in the very real teenage pain brought on by incessant bullying. The hour I spent on the bus home in middle school, hiding from the bullies with my CD player, playing the Sibelius or Mendelssohn Violin Concertos on a loop. Listening to records of Mahler symphonies on the sound system my Dad built. At five or so, hearing a Vivaldi violin piece play in the background of a fictionalized story about Vivaldi's school for orphan girls, and getting out of bed to weep to my Dad about my newly gained knowledge that some kids don't have parents to call their own. From the very beginning, music has been my constant companion, and my memories are all inextricably linked to melody, rhythm, song, the spectres of instruments buzzing sans cesse in my head.

Now though. Now I can't listen to music unless I make a conscious choice to. I must isolate myself from all other people, all other tasks (which is pretty hard to do living in a studio apartment). The memories flood me, and I become a certain kind of homesick that spans both space and time.  Heartsick. Timesick.

Here's why. Every moment, I am out of place. This is not my land. This is not my language. These are not my people. I made a choice to come live in France, to become vulnerable to that particular brand of ironic acerbity, forever sighing and smoking. We all like to pat ourselves on the back, we expats, for how worldly, how knowing we are, but at a certain point, I yearn for the brand of my people. For America. When I listen to music, I'm whipped from time and place and shoved face-down into the swirling mess of memory, memories all made in America. When I listen to music, I have to confront that part of myself that I've shut down in the name of sanity and self-preservation. If I were to regularly open that door, I'd be a puddle on the floor, too bereft for the sake of my homeland to get anything done. And I really like to get stuff done.

So what's with the teaching and the music? And that image you now have of my bawling on the floor? Here's the convergence. I mentioned I want to keep teaching college kids, and to do that, I need to do a PhD. Hah! Damn, should have listened to my director in Lyon in 2017. Thanks to my current grad program, I've been able to put certain pieces in place that hopefully will help me gain entry to an école doctorale. I want to teach English, but I did my research master's degree on music, so my professor suggested I try to blend the two for a proposed thesis topic. Revelatory. Thing is, the subject needs to be related to the anglophone world, so continuing my research into Lili Boulanger is out.

You probably didn't notice in my aforementioned list, but to me, all my life, it's been glaring: I do not listen to American music. My feeling has always been, why would I? There's so much German and French and Austrian and Italian and Russian and even English music to be absorbed, consumed, pored over, obsessed with. My music was born in Europe, even if I wasn't. Besides, American music is beyond cliché and stupid. Like, ok Bernstein, we get it, you're the voice of a nation. Or Copland, bringing Americana to the concert hall. But that's just it. It's America, writ large in symphonic form.

I don't intend to get technical here, I'm saving that for a thesis proposal. But for the past few years in France, I've been struggling with that space-time-homesickness, and I never thought to turn to American music to soothe that twisted little soul deep inside, crying out for some unironic, bald-faced openness. I'm embarrassed to admit, but I know so little about Bernstein and Copland (for example) compared to all the European greats I studied in college. West Side Story and Appalachian Spring, and that's about it. I've been dipping into that well, for the first time really, and discovering myself in there. Discovering the mirror image of open, embracing, compassion I've so missed about the America I grew up in. Wide chords, vividly chattered out in springing strings, melodic turns of phrase that speak to the experience of being an American. Quiet introspection and simplistic sophistication.

This is the America I want, but the America I fear has always been the just-out-of-reach idealized version of guileless romantics. This realization has been sponsored by living as an expat. For context, I lived in Washington D.C. from 2011 to 2014, right before moving to France. The heyday of the Obama presidency, when all the liberals could crawl out from under their collective shame and earnestly be proud of being an American again. This was the golden age for millennials. We get a lot of flak, but I lost my innocence at age 11 when 9/11 occurred. Then I was halfway through college during the Great Recession. That three-year period in DC was sacred, and I could scream that I was proud to be American without even the tiniest wisp of irony, or without any of the accompanying racism that currently gets read into it. That brief golden age obviously came to an abrupt and shocking end in 2016, and once again, we crept back under our shame. The view from Europe has been clarifying. When Trump was elected, my classmates wished me condolences as though a dear friend had just died. The longer I've been away, the more America looks like a shell of itself, an over-priced, litigation-happy joke. When I go back, I cringe at the pompous boastfulness. The French are obsessed with poking fun at the American Dream by calling it the American Nightmare. Haha.

I feel sorrow for the humiliation and death of something that I so fleetingly enjoyed. But it's so much more personal than that. As we're all sitting with our thoughts in week seven of confinement, some of us bereft from the loss of loved ones, the loss of income, and so many more, the loss of motivation, I've had the time to think about my homeland and the utter mismanagement instigating an avoidable tragedy. Maybe America was a joke to Europe, but that joke has been strangled into a very dark humor. I'm no longer rolling my eyes and poking accusatorially at the inequality of healthcare and education. I'm in mourning for the people, the place, the culture that cradled the creation of music as wide, open, and accepting as Bernstein and Copland.

I wish I had a pithy ending to this post, but I'll leave it open. No irony, no tongue-in-cheek, secret grunt of sarcasm. I don't think any of us is even capable of writing a good ending right now. We're still in the middle of it.

Stay safe, stay healthy.