When I reflect back on the past two years, I see a blur of unfocused, uncharted, and often untethered energy, punctuated by some surprising points of accomplishment, on my part as well as on the part of my students. We all have moments in our lives that disorient us, that distance us from an easy, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other progress toward our well established goals. But generally, those moments are personal, and we share them only with our closest cohort. One silver lining of the past couple years has been the shared disorientation that has helped to make us all a little more human in our responses to grief and struggle and loss and confusion. Whereas in the past, in "normal" times, I might have seen student accomplishment most often in conventional ways, I've become a person who's able to see perseverance as success, to see showing up as success. It's been easier, for most of us, I think, to appreciate the ways in which our conventional expectations do not meet our actual daily needs, and to appreciate the importance of wellbeing in ever actually being able to meet those conventional markers.

What I am taking forward with me into the future — is this appreciation for the ways that all of our lives, in teaching and in learning, hold some uncertainty and some conflicting needs. Bringing our classrooms into our homes has had the inevitable effect of bringing our homes more openly into our classrooms, and that speaks to me a kind of hopefulness, that our whole selves might walk away from this more coherently. My work self is not quite so divided from my parental self, for instance. My barking dog has played a role in my lectures, in ways I cannot erase. And the same has been true for my students. Their lives have become something they are more comfortable integrating into their educational experiences, and this offers us an enormous opportunity, to remember that — for me, here, in the Humanities, and for all of us, across the University — our educational goals have always aimed at the holistic. We teach to the brain, yes, but also to the body and its positionality, to the social realities that we expect our rigorous, discursive knowledge to affect in positive ways.

A couple specific things I'm reminded of here. First, technology. Whoa. Our learning curve in digital media has been steep, and while I will continue to depend on younger people to teach me how to use the internet, this trial by fire has forced a kind of comfort with the unknown, in ways that I hope to embrace. This openness to new tech will help me, of course, to become a little more fluent with communication in the 21st century, but it can also afford me the opportunity to model for my students a willingness to engage tools with which they are unfamiliar, unafraid of momentary failure, in the interest of developing a relative and always changing fluency. Second, community engagement. I've long been something of a devotee of the work that the Center for Community Based Learning is doing, tirelessly committed as they are to getting students into rich educational experiences outside of the traditional classroom, and in diverse contexts that are often themselves engaged in a process of self-definition and growth. But the social isolation of the past two years has ratcheted up my commitment to these practices something fierce. I think back to last year, Spring 2021: students ached for community engagement. They longed for the chance to get out of their room and into the world, and to see that what they were doing on Zoom had an application in the "real world." That sense of relevant, fruitful applicability is a deep human need, and it's also, I've come to believe, a mandate for us as educators. The polytechnic transformation — a phrase that's come to sound like something mystical, like a singularity we'll encounter and never be the same — has only heightened my awareness of this. I see that our signage is changing and that our classrooms are more technologically complicated, but when I ask myself how this transformation actually affects my teaching, or my students' learning, I'm brought back to these two points: we're called to be more humbly and creatively engaged with the ways that technology can increase access and intensify experience, and we're called to be more collaboratively and proactively engaged with the ways that our community can share in the education of our students, and our students can share in the work of our community.