I have been running around electronically the past two weeks trying to get our class’ contributions to the college alumni fund fleshed out. Your name wasn’t on my list, but when you decided to contribute, your name came my direction with a mention of your blogging passion and a link. Which I followed and found a bear snarling about the Vermont primary election. Having a house in VT, and remembering you vaguely from freshman year, I read a little further.

Then came to mind an e-mail I had sent earlier in the day to our classmates Sherry and Diana, at a low point in the quest for more donors. About my daughter, who as a freshman in public high school is complaining daily about boredom in her classes. She is a competent student, maybe of Middlebury caliber and maybe not. Her threats about stopping doing homework, in an attempt to force me to send her to another school, have me worried that she will lose her shot at a college that might resolve her boredom.

Here are the guts of the e-mail I had sent:

“I am sitting here having just read three short vignettes written by my 14 year old daughter about “tears,” for her freshman English class. One concerns her confusion re. traveling to Chicago at age 5 or so to attend the funeral of her grandfather. She still doesn’t fully understand as she puts on a black dress and later goes through the viewing line and sees him lying cold and still in the casket. But after turning back to take her seat, she finds her oldest cousin with tears streaming down his face, then she runs back up to the casket to touch her grandfather’s hand for the last time. Another is about being locked out of my office one Saturday afternoon, trapped in a deserted hallway with her older brother, who had forgotten the key code to get back in. She finds herself for the first time being the stronger one, comforting him as he cries over their desperation and his failure. The third is about receiving a note from a boy in her homeroom class in 5th grade that caused her to start crying as she sat in her seat. And the kindness of her teacher who ended class early and spent time with her quietly in her office talking about her own adolescence in Germany, and then her best friend who comforted her by twirling her as they had done to each other for years. Neither of the comforters, sensing how hurt she was, asked her to reveal the contents of the note. (Although her essay remains quiet on this, the passed note made her aware of a hurt she had unknowingly perpetrated on the boy and shattered her sense of belonging and self-worth; a year later, she succeeded in convincing us to let her change schools — I think in large part to leave the scene of the crime.)

Whew, amazing! Enough to make a person cry.”

I did in fact cry reading her writing. Something is working for her in her English class, but she doesn’t recognize it. And I think of my own life, increasingly connecting with others via e-mail — some of them people I hardly knew in college, but we are finding conections in what we exchange around the edges of — in my case — raising money for colleges, chasing branches of my genealogy with total strangers who happen to share a last name somewhere far back on the tree, etc. Almost random connections, but they lead to writing, and being funny, and developing a persona. And in many cases, leaving it behind when the alumni fund year ends, when the tree is exhausted, when the project ends. How I wish it could be more intense, even for just a while. How I wish for my daughter, whose life revolves around text messaging, to find a deeper, more satisfying connection to her schoolwork and to a future that might, just maybe, have some resemblance to what you are plotting for your own life direction as spring starts to blow in from the west, as the crust starts to soften on that VT ice pack.

Good question–I hope the answer is no, we would have the good sense to eshew grades altogether. My younger daughter attends gradeless Hampshire, and has to go through a good deal of rigorous review, including reflecting back. It begins to get at what you suggest about having alums look back. My tutors do that as they have those early works in front of them, being read by the younger students. It’s a pretty interesting, humbling, and actually inspiring experience for them. For instance, one had forgotten all about a piece she had written, and now wants to return to it for her thesis.

I frequently receive emails from alums, years down the road, looking back at those early writing experiences, remembering those pieces, fondly, and seeing the seeds of their current writing selves in those young writers. They find their old blogs. I think your idea is quite an intriguing one, to follow up with alums, have them look at the writing from years before, and reflect once again. If I were sticking around here, I’d follow up on it. Maybe I will anyway. Thanks.

bg

I’m not going to try to answer that here – I don’t know the answer. But I would suggest a different type of thing is possible based on what you’ve done already. Given the stuff is already online, could you give alumni of your class, 6 months hence, a year hence, several years hence, access to their own writing in your course and allow them to reflect on it in retrospective. For the pieces that they were proud of near the time of composition, are they still proud? Has their writing continued to mature? (It’s on this question that I wonder about the end of semester grade.) Would they even be interested in doing such an exercise – only for themselves and not for any type of cert? But if the were, say out of nostalgia, would the process hold up that way?