Spring semester is different. I know that may seem obvious—the weather is different, the holidays are different, and the students are different. Or are they?
When I teach in the spring it seems I spend a lot of time comparing my spring class to my fall class. I come back from my first classes and I think, “Gee, this group seems so different from my class in the fall. This group seems quieter. Funny, they don’t always seem to ‘get’ what I’m saying– especially my jokes.”
My perceived difference in the students gets confirmed. Many of the teachers I work with come into my office and say the same thing. “This class seems so different from the class I taught in the fall.”
“How so?” I’ll ask checking to see if they notice the same kinds of things I do.
“They’re so quiet,” the teachers will say. “My class in the fall was more talkative. This class seems kind of hesitant. In my fall class I could ask them to do anything and they would just do it. This class. . .”
“Well, they are different students,” I’ll say. “Your fall class was mostly made up of first- semester students, students who had never been to college before. This group is different. They have already been through one semester of college.”
“Right,” the teachers will say.
But one day when I was having this conversation with a teacher, I said something different. When she said that her class was quiet I said, “Well, it is the beginning of the semester.”
“Oh right,” she said. “The students are always quiet the first couple of weeks.”
And then it hit me. She was right. Students are always quiet the first few classes and they are always a bit cautious. They don’t know me as a teacher yet and I don’t know them as students. And then I realized something else.
When I think about any of my previous classes, rarely do I think about the first couple of weeks. I remember my previous classes as they were mid-semester on, when we, as a class, had settled in and hit our stride. I also tend to remember fondly the good days of the semester and forget the not so great days. In other words, like we all do with many things, I tend to romanticize the past. I remember my previous classes when we had already worked through the awkwardness of the first weeks of the semester, when the students already knew what I meant when I talked about the rhetorical triangle and they already trusted me when I said I wanted them to take risks in their writing.
So even though I know this, something still bothers me. Why do I still catch myself comparing my spring class to my fall class? Why do I rarely compare my fall class to my previous spring class? I’m still thinking there is a difference between spring and fall and that difference has to do with distance. The memory of the last half of my fall class has yet to be a distant memory. The break between the semesters doesn’t seem to be enough time for me to really separate these two classes. The spring semester doesn’t have the same sense of “newness” that the fall semester has. In the fall we begin a new academic year. The spring semester we are coming back to continue on with the same academic year. This contributes to the feeling I have when I walk into my spring class that we should just be picking up where we left off before the break. Of course the problem is, these aren’t the same students I had before the break, and it’s unfair of me to expect them to know what I’ve yet to teach them. The spring semester takes a little adjustment on my part, an adjustment to see the beginning of spring semester as a beginning as well, the same kind of beginning that the fall is.
So now when teachers tell me their spring classes seem different I ask them to remember the beginning of their fall classes.
“Oh,” they say. “Those students were pretty quiet too.”
“You know,” I say, “you may be romanticizing the fall.”
“You know,” they say, “you may be right.”
“Don’t worry,” I tell them. “This class will get there too. And soon they’ll be getting your jokes.”