There's an ancient loneliness that accompanies the end of seasons. The weather starts shifting, presaging the next phase of the year. In the Midwest, where I grew up, there would be hot, humid days in August but this deep into the month, it sometimes would start getting cold, and the first leave stems would weaken and drop.
Here it's 93.3 degrees this afternoon and cloudy. Very humid. Very weird.
The occupation of our neighborhood by the water department continues, but in this heat, they've knocked it off already and are kicking back with cold beers.
Rarely will you find humidity in San Francisco, but today just walking 20 feet out of my front door to my car caused me to break into a sweat.
A languid wave of boredom washed over me this week, alternating with peaks of stress worrying about my kid's first week in high school, my ongoing struggles to obtain meaningful insurance, and the ever-constant money worries.
One thing I'm over is any feelings like envy or jealousy in my life. For example, everybody I know, practically, is on or has taken a nice vacation this year. From a pragmatic point-of-view, that is not an option for me. But one consequence of sticking to a strict regime of lower consumption means I spent most of my time alone in my apartment or garden.
Still, random encounters boost my commitment to stay the way I normally am -- friendly toward strangers. A few days ago, a lovely young woman asked if she could talk to me about what's going on in the neighborhood.
Sure, c'mon in.
She explained she had just moved her from the Philadelphia area, and was attending graduate school, studying journalism. Her assignment that evening was to find out some leads to stories in the Mission.
Well, she came to the right guy. Many of the past 20 years, I might even have been her professor, since I often taught at the school she's attending, though not in later years; I've not been invited back since 2003.
I gave her about 50 leads and told her to stay in touch. My daughter said, "she's nice" after we'd finished the interview and I'd held the door for this smart, friendly, young African-American woman to leave.
I've always loved helping students. It seems like such a simple thing to do, but I've known others (including professors) who seem to resent student requests after perhaps too many years on the job.
There are jerk students, of course, as in any phase of life, but the great majority of students I've known are not only polite and grateful for whatever help I can give, they truly need that help. Navigating through our educational systems is nowhere as easy as it should be, IMHO.
Speaking of helping students, I may have helped my own high-schooler today by calling his counselor. Technically, he does not qualify for Honors Physics because he sometimes is frustrated by Math, which is, of course, quite important in Physics.
I was a tad pushy, asking the counselor, "Isn't there any way around this requirement? He's a strong science student and he had a great science teacher in middle school."
She thought about it a bit, and then checked some schedules. "I could place him in Honor Physics if he drops Spanish and takes Art." Then, I realized the Honors Physics teacher is the one teacher at the school I've met, and he is fantastic!
Hopefully, this will all work out for the best.
Also recently, a very nice Chinese-American student approached me for help on a paper. She's a senior at another local college. She didn't seem to have much confidence in her writing ability, but as we discussed the topic, which was comparative religions, what impressed me was the originality of her thinking.
"You're very smart," I told her. "I think you can do this." A week or so later she showed up at my door beaming. She handed me her paper, I read it and we high-fived. "You've nailed it," I told her.
She only got a B+, which puzzled me, until I remembered that her prof had graded her earlier papers as B+s, also. "Your very first paper in a course has to be your best effort," I told her, "Because the professor slots you as a C+, B, A- (or whatever) student and will fairly automatically give you the same grade from then on."
Not always, some are much more rigorous, and some students also improve or fall off in the quality of their work quite dramatically. But in general it is true that once a B+, always a B+ is the more likely outcome in a class. It's just professorial habit.
So, yes, I miss teaching, but students keep finding their way to me, which makes me happy, and that's a good thing, especially in these lugubrious days stuck in a late summer's past.
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