a.k.a. V.J.

I have a tradition at the end of each semester. I don’t remember when I started it exactly, but at some early point in my 13-year teaching career, I got into the habit of taking a picture of the empty classroom after the last student had submitted their final exam and left the room.

There was always something bittersweet about those vacant tableaus that spoke to me. Students come, they hopefully learn something, sometimes they say a nice goodbye when handing me the exam, and that’s the last I see of most of them. In the end, all that is left are the sterile off-white tables and chairs in the dim overhead light. The view of that, shot from the vantage point of my podium, made the mere minutes since that semester’s batch of learners filled the space feel like it might have been years.

I never did anything with the photos other than occasionally posting them on social media along with some wistful sentiment about The Ends of Things. Most of them are buried in the depths of my phone or my Google Photos account — maybe a few dozen nearly identical images of the same four or five classrooms. Without date stamps, I’d be incapable of differentiating the images taken in 2016 or 2017 from the ones taken last year.

I’m writing this the day after final exam night for my latest class. The last person to finish the exam was an international student who took a little extra time because he formulated his answers in his native language first and then translated them into English. When he was done, he told me he had enjoyed the class and asked about what I would be teaching in the fall. We walked together out of the room and to the parking lot. Along the way, he mentioned that he’d be flying back to his home country at the crack of dawn, laughed about how happy he was to be escaping the miserable Oswego weather, and told me about a side business he had been operating online throughout the semester. It was a great chat and, in just a few minutes, it gave me a sense of the fully fledged personality who had occupied a seat in my class for the previous 13 weeks.

We said our goodbyes and I got into my car and drove off. I was about halfway home when I realized I had never taken the obligatory photo of my empty post-final classroom. I had been so engrossed in conversation, I left without even thinking about it. For a split second, I felt the slightest pang of regret over breaking a long tradition. Then it occurred to me that the time I would have spent snapping that picture of 30 empty seats was instead spent on getting to know a student who had filled one of those seats — a genuinely interesting and likable young person with dreams, and a plan, and perspectives from the other side of the world.

For students, that final exam night is always about the relief of leaving at the end. Liberation. And for me, sitting there along with my stack of completed test packets, it always felt a bit like being ritually left behind. But now I think I have been focused on the wrong dynamic all these years. Instead of ruminating over how it felt to be the last man out of a room, I should have been thinking more about what those students might be taking away as they emerge from that room out into the wider world. And about how, occasionally, if you’re really lucky, one of those students might come to view you as somebody worth shooting the breeze with on the way out to the parking lot.