It is always edifying to get feedback from students long after they have left your classroom. One of the things that the humanities needs to more of (if we had the support and resources and time, of course) is to collect more evidence, more stories, and dare I say, data about what happens to students after they graduate. There is often a huge lag between what happens in college and how reading, writing, exploring, making, doing, failing, trying, and learning hits folks many years later. This is the burden that most humanities teachers must bear because we don’t often see “results” till well after graduation. There is an “a ha” moment when a story, a novel, a theory, a film, a text, a game suddenly clicks. Sometimes, if you are lucky, that student will reach out. I get an email every once in a while from a former student who wanted to thank me for something they encountered in one of my classes. Sometimes, I run into a former student in the wild, and we have a nice chat. And sometimes, I get a lovely tweet like the one below:
