On finding hope in nuclear catastrophe

Teaching Chernobyl and learning care

Bald eagle in flight. Photo by Jorge.

I gave one of my students this semester a mushroom sticker.

This student always sat in the front row and participated in every class. She made brilliant connections and she wasn’t scared to be straight-up searing smart. She wasn’t annoying and show-offy – she just really paid attention and thought and voiced her thoughts. She was never on her phone.

She told me where she got Thai iced tea, and she gave a presentation on fungus that eats radiation, and for her final project she made gorgeous, intricate paintings of microbes, to highlight the invisible life damaged by Chernobyl. She rocked.

I gave her the sticker because I found it at the library and it reminded me of her – she’s a biology major and has a beetle sticker I’d complimented on her water bottle.

“I think it’s an amanita?” I said with the hesitation of someone who knows exactly two species of mushrooms.

She said “Oh my God!” and immediately unpeeled and stuck it on her computer. Slav 1860 will live forever (or at least a few years??) on her laptop! I was honored.

In the past, I haven’t had this kind of closeness with my students. They are The Students and I am The Teacher and they have Assignments Due and I Grade Said Assignments. I am friendly with them, will get coffee with them if they ask, but the relationship is wary – we are clearly on distinct sides of a power dynamic. My job is to keep them in line, and their job is to perform.

But this semester, I stumbled onto a weird and unexpected paradox. I stopped caring what my students did, and discovered I cared about them. Really liked them as people. Of course, I liked them before, but from behind a podium. Trying constantly to get them to turn off their freaking phones. Trying constantly to assess whether they did the reading (nope!). I felt responsible for them.

This semester, I agreed to teach a history class in the Slavic Department about Chernobyl, dissecting surreal obscure Russian documentaries, analyzing punk rock and poetry about the world’s largest nuclear catastrophe, reading unbelievably depressing oral histories, and showing PowerPoint slides of Chernobyl snow globes ($38 on Amazon) alongside questions like, “How could this be healing?”

It was absurd. It was great. It was hard. I was so focused on not messing it up – that is, not seeming like someone who has never actually been to any Eastern European or Slavic country and speaks none of these languages and up until January 5th had zero experience in this area – that I stopped caring about what my students did.

I mean, clearly I cared if none of them spoke or seemed engaged or understood the material or did the assignments. But this wasn’t the case. They’d chosen to take this rather esoteric class and from the get-go most were on board.

They of course did all the typical maddening stuff students do: they turned in their discussion boards late, or asked “Oh wait professor, there was a reading?” or tried to multitask working on their math homework during class.

Before, I would’ve issued corrections for these things. I would’ve tried to keep everyone “on task.” I would’ve controlled and organized “for their own sake.”

But this semester I just hung on as best I could for the wild ride of super-dark Belarussian horror flicks paired with Foucault and let them do what they needed to do. I didn’t want them to dislike or judge me and also, I didn’t feel I had nearly as much power as I do in a composition class, which I’ve taught many times and where I feel like an “expert.”

And this changed power dynamic – truly learning with and alongside them, with humility – dramatically altered the classroom. Yes, it’s annoying when they are on their phones or they haven’t read. But chastising them, or forcing them into presence, doesn’t actually work. The begrudging compliance generated by these acts of control doesn’t, as I’d long believed, facilitate a better experience or deeper learning. It just makes me feel less paranoid that I’m doing a shitty job, being ignored, not being taken seriously.

It also helped that I was a student this semester. I took an intermediate Portuguese class, and I was that student on a snowy Saturday morning emailing, “I am so sorry, I completely forgot Project 4 was due yesterday!!” I realized that the more I felt hyper-monitored and controlled and judged in class, the less eager and joyful I felt.

My Portuguese professor was twenty-seven years old and had a tattoo of a dachshund in a hot dog bun and was Brazilian and essentially just chill as fuck. She told me when I was apologizing profusely for a late assignment, “It’s okay. I really believe everyone is doing the best they can.”

So simple. But I carried it with me all semester. Everyone is doing the best they can. You can nudge them towards better with good course design – closed laptops whenever possible! Printed readings, what an antiquated concept! Moving chairs around! Interesting questions!– but really, they’re going to bring what they’re willing and able to bring.

Some of them are just plain old not going to care or try as hard as they can to “get away with” doing as little as possible or find the material dull or beneath them. You can’t muscle them into learning.

This doesn’t mean ignoring or shunning them – it just means letting them do their thing. I had two such students in the Chernobyl class. One stayed pretty checked out all semester, but the other seemed to wake up a month or two in, and suddenly started participating. I didn’t goad or force him. I just tried to create a space where, when he was ready, he could jump in.

So a few students will be like that - just overwhelmed, or uninterested, or too busy. Then many others will be up for it, but maybe a little bit hit and miss in the readings they do, or their participation. If you just keep showing up with faith in them, many will respond in kind. And a few will really blow your mind.

A few – five or six or seven even – will think hard in real time so you can feel their minds working, connections being made like little chisp-chisp-chisps of a spark catching, and their ideas will be so genuinely cool and funny and interesting they’ll make you think, and around and around you’ll go in the glory of the humanities.

“Learning together” sounds like such a hokey bullshitty concept, and I’ve been quite skeptical of it in the past. Really, you can’t use a semicolon and we’re “learning together”? But it’s all in the design.

You teach down, or you teach out. Often, you have to do a bit of both, but the trick is to know very clearly when you’re teaching down, and when you’re teaching out, and not trying to pretend you’re doing the latter when you’re actually doing the former. I have been very guilty of this. I pretend we’re all having a big open-ended “learning together” discussion about Foucault but actually no, Damon, I want you to understand that Foucault is talking about a massive disciplinary apparatus that keeps us all quivering in conformity even when we think we’re free, okay?

Now, I would teach Damon this directly – teaching down – and then we would move on to have a hopefully interesting and genuine conversation about how the university functions as a Panopticon and whether this is “good for us” or not – teaching out. Moving between these modes is freeing; it clearly airs out the roles and expectations.

One of the most useful techniques I learned in mindfulness is recognizing what’s here. Pretty basic stuff, again, but something most of us actively spend a lot of our time not doing. How many dynamics and classrooms and conversations and situations have we endured in which we try to pretend that whatever is happening is not happening or is actually something else? Try to bury our expectations, feelings, reactions, etc, and just somehow be neutral blobs?

In the classroom, recognizing what’s here feels to me like acknowledging when I am in charge, “teaching” something directly, telling them what I want them to know, and when we are doing the collective work of figuring out an idea together. When we’re all looking at the snow globe on the PowerPoint and asking, is this gross? Cute? Weird? Helpful? When we’re then googling snow globes of other catastrophes and discovering this is really a thing, and asking ourselves who would collect this, and realizing the Amazon snow globe is using the Ukranian spelling of Chernobyl. We are asking, why does one desire a souvenir of an event that produced four times the radioactive fallout of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and annihilated a piece of the earth that won’t recover for hundreds of thousands of years? We ended that discussion asking if it was okay to dance at Ground Zero. Vive les sciences humaines!!

I showed up eager to do my work, which was to teach. And I let them figure out how they wanted to student. I didn’t take it personally. If they didn’t do a discussion board or a reading, that was up to them. I gave them the requisite points, or not, and moved on. No drama, no shame. If they asked for an extension, I gave it. Everyone is doing the best they can. When I gave them more space and trust, they often gave me good faith in return.

On the last day of class, I told my students, “This has been an intense time for me, with everything that’s going on in the world, and you all have been a real bright spot. Thank you for being so smart and so capable.” I almost cried; I really meant it.

Several students stayed after that last class just to chat; I told them to keep in touch and they said they would. It gave me faith, in what has been a period of great uncertainty for me and many others in the arts and academia, that people are still deeply committed to the exhilaration of ideas and intellectual life and culture and justice and truth and the Big Questions.

And it reaffirmed for me, when the overwhelming tendency in our society right now is towards punishment and pettiness and blame and hatred and judgment, towards the (ironic) violent policing of speech and intense dystopian control of the state, that care works, and in the long run, it wins every time.

When you trust and listen to people instead of trying to control and punish them, you create so much more joy. So much more goodwill. For them, and also for yourself, because controlling and punishing and hating and judging suck up pretty much all the meaning of being alive.

The other night after I’d spent a long time in despair about the very real ways this administration is impacting my life, I jumped on a loving-kindness meditation through the center where I did my MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) course a few years ago. We breathed and sent wishes for peace, health, safety and happiness to ourselves, and our loved ones, and then to living beings everywhere.

At the end of the meditation, we were invited to unmute and share thoughts. There were maybe thirty people on the call. Several people unmuted and said they’d been feeling despair, or rage, and they didn’t want to get stuck in that feeling. So they’d tried to find ways to move towards loving-kindness. Not to annihilate very real and grave horror at what’s happening, or mute their desire for action, but to fight back from a place of care. Of calm.

Thirty people showed up on a Wednesday night, each with their own hurt and doubt, just to send loving-kindness into the world. There’s that, my friends. Take that with you. It extends to you, too.

The semester is almost over. Spring has come on like it does: gradually, painstakingly, in teasing and brutal bits, and then in a burst of glory. The trails in the park are suddenly voluptuous with shade. My pansies bob their little pug faces in the morning sun. My Portuguese exam was today and I don’t think I studied enough, I didn’t recall if it was são or estão for stating time, but I was really just grateful to be there. To be in that space, to be able to hold a functional conversation now about travel and my favorite foods and the present-tense behaviors of approximately ten varieties of animals, and to participate in the delightful endeavor of entering a new symbolic universe.

For that I have my teacher to thank. I gave her eggs from my chickens, and she gave me a space to look forward to every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, even unprepared, even tired, even overwhelmed.

Obrigada, Luiza, you with your tattoos and your wisdom. I hope you remember sledding for the first time. I hope you remember Portuguese 103 and the multiple occasions on which I announced “I’m excited” without remembering the unique connotations of that expression in Brazilian Portuguese. I hope you leave with fond memories of what the United States and Americans can be, even as we have spent much time discussing military dictatorship and what happened in Brazil and what’s happening here. I hope you remember the magnolia trees and dogwoods the Argentine-American student and I urged you to find at the start of spring. I wish you well. May you be healthy. May you be happy. May you be safe. May you be free from suffering.