A New Semester

Will miss them—my students with whom I’ll begin a new semester tomorrow. Would like to tell them so, but that would sound corny.

It’s too soon. We haven’t hung out together yet, which, in my class, means we haven’t read one another’s stuff yet. Yes, they read my things too. It’s how I teach.

It started 20 years ago when I was a graduate teaching assistant at Texas Tech. I decided to give myself the same assignments I was giving students. For example, while they wrote narratives about people who had influenced them, I wrote columns in the Amarillo Daily News about the same—my father-in-law, my wife, my sister.

I’ll use those pieces this semester to show how a writer forms a thesis statement, how he crafts an introduction, how she decides what to include and exclude in a story—because knowing what to leave out is as important as knowing what to leave in.

And, hopefully, they’ll learn from me, as I learn from them (a subject that deserves its own blog post).

So I’ll tell these students that on the last day of class (how grateful I am for what they’ve given me). And it is then I will say how much I’m going to miss them, which I hope won’t sound too corny.