At this point in every academic year I perform the same morbid ritual of starting to count how many classes remain until freedom and then quietly weep when the first digit is a 4. Usually this is the season of attrition, because the weather is terrible, it gets dark at 4 in the afternoon, the lectures feel longer, the weeks feel shorter, and my students show the conversational energy of ornamental houseplants. This year, however, something odd has happened. My body has been experiencing a fit of creative writing of its own since last November, and has taken to sending me daily mixed signals that make me briefly wonder whether I should be revising my lecture slides or my will. To complicate things we have the fact that it’s literally a roulette of symptoms, each one cheerfully unhelpful, like a doctor who only communicates via riddles. So, against all reasonable expectation, teaching has become the steadiest thing in my life. My timetable, the classrooms, the brain-numbing slides, even the occasional humiliation of discovering that I still don’t fully understand the textbook I assigned (I blame the colleague who wrote it, obviously) have turned into a kind of lifeline, a place where the world narrows to something manageable like a room, a subject, a computer with Windows Whichevereditionthisis and sequence of ideas that mostly behave themselves.
This year I have, it must be said, some of the least vocal students in recorded history, to the point that if participation were measured in decibels I would be teaching a monastery. I sometimes suspect they communicate with one another via Whatsapp and have simply (and rightly) excluded me from the channel. At the same time, I am teaching enough new subjects that I suspect I may now be spending as much time with the textbooks as they are, or possibly more than most of them, which is a mildly alarming thought. Seriously, there are moments when I catch myself revising the material with the slightly desperate energy of someone who might be examined on it later. But in a year where my own body feels like an unreliable narrator, the classroom has become strangely dependable and beautifully predictable, so for once I am not counting down the classes with dread.