Okay, it’s not actually the end of the semester quite yet. But it’s close. Close enough for the clever title of this clever blog.
For those of you who wouldn’t know, I’m but a humble educator. I spent a lifetime as a high school teacher. And now I’m spending another lifetime as a professor. A teacher of high school teachers. My life, since I was about six, has been set to the tune of the school year. The end of a semester always brings closure to what came before. Opens up space for what is going to come next.
I wasn’t sure I’d make it to the end of the fall semester in this, the year of our Lord, 2024. And yet November is turning to December and my college students are writing a journal entry entitled “landing the plane.”
Because the plan is now landing.
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I haven’t hidden much in these weekly blogs. I just keep oversharing. Too much information. Information about anxiety, insomnia, and medication. Information about my something-of-a-breakdown. I just let that stuff ooze out of me into the internet, titillating the millions of readers of this blog. And by millions, I mean the 4 people who check this thing. 4 people who read on purpose or on accident.
“Oh, Samuel Jaye Tanner. He seems fun!” a random internet scroller might think as they see my Facebook post. Or my WordPress post.
Then there’s my college students.
“What the hell is this?” they say when they realize I write these obsessive blogs. Then they read a little bit. Then they leave with a certain taste in their mouths. What kind of taste? I have no idea. Their interest in me usually wanes. Like the moon.
Anyway.
I’ve poured myself out this fall. Even when things were bleak. I kept writing. It’s good for me to write a little each week. To take a few minutes and construct these poorly edited and mostly unplanned blogs. Keeps me chipping away at a craft that I’ve been drawn to since I was a child. I’ve learned enough to know that writing, for me, isn’t about being clever. It’s not about being strategic. It’s not about being best-selling or worst-selling. It’s about making space to connect across words. Connect with what? Everything. Everything that is, was, and will be.
***
Teaching, for me, is about connection too. Connection with everything that is, was, and will be. With idiosyncratic groups of people in a specific time and place. Building something together and then letting that something go. Release it to the universe. Don’t control it. Just let it happen.
I’m glad I hung in there this semester. I was considering a leave of absence when things were ugly getting uglier. When five days of insomnia because six. Instead, I forced myself to keep showing up to class. And now I’m finishing those classes with two beautiful group of students. Students I feel lucky to have spent time with. Being a professor at the University of Iowa is cool. Brilliant English majors. Aspiring teachers. Good people.
All of this blogging is simply to say this: It’s the end of the semester and I feel fine. Mostly fine, anyway. Pointing in a better direction.
Samuel Jaye Tanner 