NPR recently reported that the Covid pandemic may have a lasting impact on our personalities. At the start of the semester, I was optimistic that our students would have a more normal college experience than they’d had these past three years. While many signals of normalcy are reappearing on campus, all is not well.
To start, the expectation and hope of having a “normal semester” may have been too much too soon. Students and faculty are contending with symptoms of long-Covid. Students and faculty are actively mourning the loss of loved ones. Students and faculty have been so busy these past three years just trying to hold things together, that little time has been spent processing Covid’s impact.
Unpacking Covid’s impact is going to take time, and even before the pandemic, it felt like we never had enough time. Now, our students are almost desperately attempting to make up for lost time. Deprived of normal social interaction at a key developmental stage, they are rushing to enjoy each other. But instead of this time bringing them what they were hoping for–more connection, more meaning and purpose, a sense of belonging–the reality is that these things which were difficult even during good years have become more of a challenge.
Finding connection, finding meaning and purpose, finding belonging: all of these have become more difficult because young people are out of practice given their experience of lockdown. And here is where I urge us faculty to make the lives of our students easier. Though many of us are contending with feelings of burnout and demoralization, I think we can play an important role in helping our students in their quest for connection, meaning and purpose, and belonging.
We can do this in the ways we create community in our classrooms, we can do this through the ways we listen during advising sessions, and we can do this in all the ways we introduce students to the subjects we teach.
The main lesson I’ve learned about teaching these last few weeks is that as understanding as I try to be when it comes to supporting students, I need to be even more understanding. They’ve gone through too much and they haven’t been given the space or the tools to process all that they’ve experienced. They are trying to make up for lost time, and this only makes them fall further behind. They are looking for purpose in life, and nothing they are doing seems to get them there. They are having a hard time honoring commitments and taking risks, because they are preserving the energy and effort they have, waiting for that thing that will help these past three years make sense.
Jonathan Lear wrote about radical hope as an orientation aimed at bringing something good into existence out of impossible circumstances. I think we are standing firmly in a moment that demands radical hope. Our students are in need of signs that good things will emerge from the difficulties of these past years. They need to feel that college will help them discover and find what they are looking for, and I believe that the success of residential liberal education depends on providing students with this experience.
In the coming weeks, I will share ideas for how we might offer students this experience. In the meantime, please reach out if you have ideas you’d like to share or if would like my support as you continue to find ways to support our students.