Member Perspective: “Dear Students, Go forth into the Wild, Beautiful, Terrible World and Use Everything you Gathered Here”
Ann Arbor’s LSA LEO Lecturer Margot Finn has been writing letters to her students all semester.
Like for many faculty teaching remotely, and especially for those managing asynchronous classes, connecting with and engaging students has been both the most difficult and challenging, and also at times the most powerful and fulfilling. Her letter captures so much of the overwhelming nature of the work—for faculty and for students—as well as the anxieties, hopes, and highlights that teaching offers in regular times and that have been felt even more acutely during this past year. Here’s Margot’s last letter to her students for the semester:
“As a lecturer, my job is teaching first and foremost, and I see my research and writing as something that occasionally takes me away from that. Yes, yes, those things are supposed to be complementary, but let’s not pretend time is infinite and choices don’t have to be made.”
Margot Finn
Ann Arbor | Curriculum Support, LSA | Lecturer II
“Hi everyone,
In some ways, this semester is ending like any other: I'm trying to get the normal semester's work graded before final papers come in and answering questions by email that get me all excited to read those later this week (not that "I love grading!" is a sentence any teacher of any grade has ever said in all honesty). Just like always, I find the amount of reading and responding to student work I will do in the next week daunting. And just like always, I'm sad and surprised at how much I'm going to miss this class. I don't mean the course (which I will teach again next semester and again intermittently for as long as UM lets me and anyone wants to take it) but the fleeting community we created here.
Some of you I feel like I'm saying goodbye to without ever really getting to say hello properly, and I hope those of you I haven't gotten to connect to personally have gotten at least some of what you wanted to out of the class. Designing an asynchronous class sometimes felt like being a poker dealer who, instead of dealing the usual hand and taking bets and dealing again as needed, laid out hands of solitaire for everyone at the table and then promptly disappeared into a poof of smoke and Gather.town sessions where we couldn't even hear each other. Others of you, I have gotten to know more intimately than ever, Zooming into each other's homes, writing papers among and about family members and roommates and sometimes sharing anxieties and sickness and loss that we're going through simultaneously alone and as part of a collective cultural experience.
As I look back across the weeks we spent together-and-apart and all that transpired in that time, what glimmers for me in the midst of great darkness is how often I got to see the light of learning switch on for you. Through your videos and quiz responses, your astonishing papers and our Zoom meetings and email exchanges, I feel I've gotten to know at least some of you as well as I might have in a normal semester. Every one of those moments of getting to learn with you have sustained me.
I end with the image above because being a union member and being a lecturer are both central to what it means to me to teach, and what I hope you will take from this class, whatever project group you may have been in or readings you were assigned. You are powerful, and you can find the answer to just about any question that burns within you. Sometimes your power comes standing with a collective, as unions do. GEO may not have prevailed in all of their demands, but they reminded the university of the power of their graduate student workers and also empowered other workers to take a stand. Sometimes your power comes from believing that you can know something.
I am not a professor, although some of you have called me that, usually out of respect, and I don't correct you because I don't mind. Here's the difference: professors are hired for their research and teaching is something that is seen as mostly taking away from their primary purpose. As a lecturer, my job is teaching first and foremost, and I see my research and writing as something that occasionally takes me away from that. Yes, yes, those things are supposed to be complementary, but let's not pretend time is infinite and choices don't have to be made. It’s been a hard semester for many of us, and I haven’t been as attentive to my work as I feel I normally am, but I trust that my dedication to your learning still shows.
“What glimmers for me in the midst of great darkness is how often I got to see the light of learning switch on for you.”
Please know that my commitment to your learning does not end with this class. If you have a question I can help you find an answer to, even years from now, email me. I will be delighted to hear from you and overjoyed that you are still thinking about our class. Not all faculty may feel the same way, but I think you should treat them as if they do. Give them the opportunity to fail to respond, don't assume that's what they will do. Especially at the University of Michigan, some part of everyone's salary is paid by taxpayers. The expertise and knowledge generated and held by the faculty at this university are a public good and a resource you have privileged access to, now and forever as a result of the degree you are getting with this institution's name on it.
I hope you are exploring things you’re genuinely curious about or in love with or furious about in your final paper. I hope you’ll go on fostering the light of learning within you. And I hope you’ll let others light their candles in the flame of knowledge you each hold within you already, fed by the wisdom and promise of your ancestors. Go forth from the buildings we never even gathered in this year out into the wild, beautiful, terrible world and use everything you carried and gathered here to make it yours.
My eternal best,
Margot”
*If you are a Lecturer who has shared similar letters with your students, or if you are a student who has received a letter from a Lecturer that has impacted you in some way during this pandemic school year, please send it along to us (with their permission) and we’ll consider posting it here: Communications@leounion.org