Drama is a key element of storytelling. It's also a word that has turned into slang for overly expressive, overly reactive, melodrama.
Over the past ten days, my mother has gone through a great deal of trauma. While I usually have little difficulty writing about personal events in my life, I have held off on this one. She went into the hospital on Friday, May 2, after a urine test uncovered a urinary tract infection and bloodwork uncovered extremely high white blood cell counts. She did not have an appetite and was suffering from symptoms of what seemed like a bronchial infection. Three days later, a cat scan had revealed a raging infection in her stomach and she was rushed into an emergency surgery. She was in an intensive care unit for two days, and is recovering very slowly.
My sisters and I experienced most of this from a distance. We were on alert to travel to Indiana at a moment's notice, but as the days passed and it looked like she would be in the hospital under a fair amount of close care for quite a few days, the planning for travel grew prolonged and somewhat tense. It escalated for me into what almost felt like drama over the weekend as I wrestled between the need to submit my final grades, the gnawing worries in my stomach, and anxiety over how and when I would get to Indiana.
Today, my drama gave way to tears. They rolled down my face from the time I woke up until sometime around Noon. The grades still needed to be submitted, and I still had a lot of student projects to go through. Somehow, I managed to get it done.
The students inspired me.
One of the insights I have gained from this round of crunch-time grading is that college students are brilliant. They are creative, innovative, thoughtful, insightful risk-takers who will do great things better often when left alone. Therein lies the trauma and drama of being a teacher. Conventional wisdom says that good teachers are no longer lecturers or guru-like deliverers of knowledge in the style of the sage on the stage but are instead facilitators of learning, the so-called guides on the side. Yet, being a guide means surrendering control. Surrendering control means trusting that the outcomes will be good but worrying that the students will think less of you for checking out. The trauma and drama of it all.
Challenges also remind me of the 28-day challenge that I assigned Digital Storytelling students. I proposed that they each pick an activity that was meaningful to them and do it every day for 28 days. They completed this challenge in the month of March, and as I am looking over the outcomes with the hindsight of a couple of months, I am surprised pleasantly by its effects. Students blogged more frequently and better. Some of them showed a marked improvement in writing skills. One young man looked up different vocabulary words and created an attractive wiki based on the meanings of those words. Another student wrote a 28-line song, and as a project set it to music, with his wife performing the lyrics. And, finally, a student who professed to hate Twitter with a passion resolved to create a story on Twitter and did so with interesting results.
I feel that life has been challenging for the past several months, but I am calm with this challenge. I feel that it is teaching me how to live as a person who is now in her fifties, where a third generation is being born and illness, inevitable death, restorations of health, war, peace, sanity, insanity, pain, fear, resilience, and strength are part of the daily bread of life.
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