Trying to say goodbye in a pandemic (a letter to my students)
I have been wondering since the beginning of May about what to write to you in this, my final announcement for this course. I even just googled “how to say goodbye to your students in a pandemic” thinking maybe somebody already waxed eloquent on this, and I could just borrow their ideas into my own message — since I really am blanking.
What I found:
Some blogger on “Faculty Focus” (great source!) wrote that I should make you a selfie video to “reinforce connection” and “provide closure.” But alas, 1. selfie videos mostly freak me out, and 2. I can’t even remember the last time I brushed my hair (because quarantine, remember).
Somebody else wrote for Georgetown University’s “The Teaching Commons”: Don’t make it an end but rather “a springboard into the future” (source here). But what a weird moment this is, for thinking about the future… Truth: I’m mildly obsessed with the present right now, and I don’t think I can pretend otherwise.
So…
Let me start, instead, with the sincerest thank you I can put into typeface. This is, in fact, what I most want to communicate to you each right now.
While the course you’ve just completed has been, historically, dreaded and sometimes even hated by MCAD students, it is MY FAVORITE of all the courses I have ever taught (at MCAD, at SAIC, at Northwestern U) because every single semester I come out knowing way more than I knew going in. Sure, this is true to some extent in my other courses, but this one, unlike any other LibArts course, puts every single one of you in position to do radically different work — it’s like a course that contains 20 disciplines within it.
In case you want a sense of all that I learned with you guys while here in the last few months, what follows is an overview:
This semester, *my* new knowledge includes whole sets of information indexed by words and phrases including “fictophilia,” “fictosexuality” (thank you, Evie), and “urban explorers” (thank you, Ky). I can now distinguish between sociopaths and psychopaths (thank you, Blue), and I know far more about the neurology and relativity of human emotional experience than I did in January (thank you, Aili).
I have a much deeper appreciation for the role of video games in mental health (thank you, Rachel), and for the work of caregivers who live with people living with Alzheimer’s disease (thank you, Meg). I also now have huge problems with the negativity associated with escapism and escapists (thank you, Janelle), and with the heteronormativity that continues to dominate U.S. sex ed in high schools (thank you, Alana).
One of you pushed Banksy into my already obsessive thinking about art and the artists who most successfully manipulate the art market (thank you, Ali), and another provided me with a much deeper understanding of the history and design of memes — and you did this at the exact same time that the party game What Do You Meme? became one of my favorite “escapes” (thank you, Preston).
Another of you introduced me to a community of “vegan artists” creating art in response to animal agriculture and who I would not otherwise have known (thank you, Emily), while yet another of you made me, first, super uncomfortable, and then, immediately after, entirely convinced of our need to reform statutory rape law in the U.S. (for both the initial discomfort and the newfound conviction, I am thankful to you, Rylan)
My knowledge of androgyny and the radical reworking of gender tropes in anime and manga, and how that has influenced comic art well beyond Japan, is now far more concrete that it was before — plus I have a new typology of gender relevant character traits with which to think (thank you, Irenka). My ethnographic understanding of bathroom experience as lived and felt by individuals who are gender non-conforming is light years beyond what it was four months ago (thank you, Kade).
And then there were two of you who forced me toward new considerations of the Covid moment in which we suddenly, half-way through this semester, found ourselves. One of you did this via a blogger-style rebuttal to the paranoia that currently dominates our social media landscape (thank you, Mindi), and the other did this via a researched, poetic response to the many brand new shifts in our daily lives and experiences (thank you, Hannah)…
To each one of you, let me say once more: thank you. For being interesting. For investing your time and labor. And for letting me into your research processes all semester long. It has been a pleasure getting to be in conversation with you.
I wish you all the best in all that is to come, obviously, and please do not hesitate to be in touch. Whenever you want — and this is especially true if you ever have shows in Mexico City. (Let me know!) In all cases and places, of course I am excited to get to see what sorts of things you have yet to do and be and become…!
Lastly, in the TOTALLY over-cited recently yet nevertheless highly apt words of one of my favorite philosophers, Albert Camus:
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer… It says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger — something better, pushing right back.
…May you each have found or soon find your own invincible summers — whatever forms these take. You are so much bigger and better than the problems (and the problem-makers) of this world. This I know, even as you doubt.
Take care of yourselves — and of each other,
Dawn
