I am currently in the midst of my summer session at Diablo Valley College and have just started up an Introduction to Fiction class for UCLA.  Both classes are online, so I can teach in my swim suit if I want, and at this point--after the terror of the add period ceased--things are going just fine with both, students posting away.

Last night when going through some old grade books, I came upon a piece of paper where at some point, I'd written down sentences students wrote in their essays.  I slightly remember doing this, but as gradebooks can last for years, I don't remember when I wrote them down.  But I do remember the students writing the sentence and I remember them, sort of.

The first student was from my first "teaching" gig ever.  I was hired to work in the tutoring center at Cal State Stanislaus in 1983.  I barely knew what I was doing myself, but I fancied myself an English major.  It wouldn't be until I took a grammar class in graduate school that I knew the extent of my own personal knowledge of the language (not as much as I'd hoped), but I could help edit essays and draw out details and specifics.  I knew how to block out an essay on the page, and every day, students came in for help.

This one young man always smelled of ginger and garlic, and he always was happy to be sitting with me, going over his work.  He was from Hong Kong, and he was going to be an engineer.  He was struggling to get through the first year of English, a composition class, and like so many of my current students at DVC, he didn't know grammar as well as he needed to.  So every day, we went over the basic ideas of English syntax and proper verb conjugation.

And yet, he had so much creativity.  Once when he was writing about his girlfriend and their breakup, he wrote, "Like a balloon explode suddenly, my heart was something empty."

I remember just taking that one in, saying it to myself over and over so I wouldn't forget, writing it down years later in that gradebook, writing to you now about it.  I know that balloon.  I've had that feeling.  I always got it.  And trust me, I was loathe to correct the verb issue.  I had to do so, but why?  It works so well.

When I last met with him, he gave me a 1984 calendar made of bamboo.  That year was an important year, the year I got pregnant, the year I had my first son.  The year my life shifted and moved.  No balloons explode suddenly, but my heart did a lot of work.

I never saw him again.

The next student is a bit more vague in my memory, but he was happy and loose and free.  A retro hippie, a long haired, white boy, a true blithe spirit.  We were writing a descriptive essay, and he wrote, "Then they see the sun and are in like total wow of its magnificence."

It was as though I were reading his actual speech pattern.  And I got that sentence, too.  I've been in total wow of a lot of things in my day.  Of the balloon that explode suddenly.  That was a total wow. Of 1984.   Of my son.  Total wow.

I have total wow every single day, and I had never heard it articulated like that. 

I'm not sure what happened to this student.  As I've written before, people come in and out of my life in semester waves.  But I think him for this notion.

Today, I'm hoping to have total wow, and hoping my balloon does not explode suddenly.  I am ready for all the magnificence the sun can offer.

Jessica