As I mentioned in a previous post, I asked my students to keep what I called a Coronavirus Journal when our course went from live lessons to remote learning, and they continued to post in our journal up until the last class.
They wrote about so many things -- anxiety, boredom, hope, love, and the big things that seem small and the small things that seem big, to paraphrase the memoirist Beth Kephart. One student wrote about being the product of a divorce, which meant during her childhood she didn't know her half siblings very well. Now they are sharing a house under quarantine and catching up on the lost years. Heart breaking -- mine is.
Some treated the diary -- which we posted to an online forum that's part of the course's cyberhome -- as a private account where they could say anything. Indeed, one student remarked that he would probably never see any of us again and so he divulged his most intimate preoccupations, his failures, his worries. Then he would write that he hoped no one was reading his posts. Still, they were there -- and I read them.
These students are graduate students, not undergrads. But the tenderness, the loneliness, the fear inherent in their posts rendered them more like high school students, and I say that as a compliment. They didn't hold back. Didn't posture.
Here's the post I contributed to Brevity magazine's Nonfiction Blog about it:
https://brevity.wordpress.com/2020/04/27/my-students-are-finally-keeping-a-journal/
