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        They tell you that it gets easier.         They are damned liars.         Every single one of them. Each consecutive day is harder than the one before it, and it doesn’t start rosy. They arrive early. They don’t tell you that, either. Thirty-seven to thirty-eight weeks at the latest. Or twenty-nine. They don’t tell you just how small they are. Four pounds, one ounce and three pounds, two ounces in Nettie’s and Lucy’s case. They don’t tell you about how they’ll be immediately separated from one another in the NICU or the weeks you’ll spend there or how you’ll come to crave that coffee that tastes like it has been filtered through an old sock. They don’t tell you about forehead IVs. They don’t tell you about the nurses that are godsends and the doctors that are not. They tell you that you will eventually leave, but they don’t tell you when. They don’t tell you that you’ll cart around two vital sign monitors everywhere you go when you do. They don’t tell you about all the times that you’ll wake up panic-stricken at 2AM when the rhythmic beeping stops because the strap has slipped off their chest. Or about the time you will rush back to the NICU when it’s still on. They don’t tell you that there will be double the literal and metaphorical shit. Double everything: pain, joy, mess, love, difficulty. They don’t tell you that there will be two of them and they are each their own person. But there are and they are.          They tell you that that season will pass.         It will.         But that doesn’t mean it gets easier. I became a parent of identical twins early in my teaching. I didn’t tell my students when my daughters were born. I believed in caring for my students as humans—cura personalis and all that—but I was also advised that I was not to be their friend. That there should be a distance to the professorial relationship. I also became a doctor that eventful semester. I didn’t tell my students when I defended my dissertation. I didn’t request that they start addressing me as “doctor” for the remainder of the semester. I shied away from accolades and self-promotion. One day after class a student inquired about the patient identification wristband I was wearing. I explained that I had not been hospitalized, but the band allowed me in and out of the NICU, where I had been sleeping and where Nettie and Lucy were to spend several weeks. The next class I received a handwritten note of congratulations and well wishes. In that moment I learned that caring for students as people involves more than just recognizing their humanity. It means allowing them to see ours as well. Three years later when my partner was diagnosed with cancer, voice cracking and holding back tears, I told my students of the diagnosis and positive prognosis. They sent notes. Gift cards. Signed up for my family’s MealTrain. Beth has now passed her one-year anniversary of showing no evidence of disease. We teach real humans. We are also ourselves real humans. There is no prescriptive practice for being human. There is also no prescriptive practice for putting our humanity on display within a learning community. But I have come to learn that bringing less than my full self to teaching is of benefit to no one.

A few weeks ago, my eight-year-old daughter decided to grade the weekend we spent together. I don’t know where she got this idea. I didn’t love it. Our weekend scored a 70/100. Readers, over the course of this weekend, we ate pizza, hot dogs, and fried chicken. We went to the pool, twice, where she played with two different sets of friends. We got her favorite ice cream flavor at our favorite ice cream place. We watched an animated film of her choosing. We went rollerblading at a nearby playground. We went to a park where she participated in a kid’s mud race. We attended a local Bach concert. We walked down to eat breakfast one morning at a beloved brunch place, which had just recently reopened after having been closed during the pandemic. There were some challenges. I made her rollerblade. Even though they were rollerblades she herself requested from her grandparents for Christmas,  rollerblading is still hard for her, and she doesn’t like doing it, and she grumbled throughout the entire experience, and I got annoyed, and we butted heads. But we cuddled, chatted, and laughed a lot too. And this was a C-?!? I felt disappointed, hurt, even, by the low score. I wanted to protest about how hard I had tried to create a good weekend for her. I wanted to detail all the effort I had put into our plans. I wanted to point out all the good things about my weekend “performance.”I wanted a different score. And I definitely wanted to put way less effort into future weekends, if my best efforts were, at most, going to earn me a 70%. And then I realized precisely what—or rather who—I felt like. I felt like one of my students who had tried really hard, on a paper or a test, and who still didn’t get the grade they wanted, that they thought they deserved. The same students who send seemingly entitled emails late at night or come by my office hours to do the dreaded “grade grubbing.” The same students about whom I sometimes privately think: Tough noogies. Effort isn’t everything. You can work hard and things still won’t necessarily go your way. This is life. Oof. Researchers are coming to better appreciate the role of emotions in learning (see here and here, for instance). Grading, in particular, is an “emotional practice,” for students and instructors alike. Getting this score from my daughter was a good reminder for me—and for all of us—of just how difficult the learning process can be for students. Failure (or even a C-level grade, which certainly isn’t failure), on top of everything else going on in their lives (e.g., living away from home for the first time, working part-time jobs, health problems, relationship issues, etc.), can hurt. It can feel frustrating, demoralizing, unfair—even if it is also “a necessary component of learning and growth.” When we get a low score, or other negative feedback, it can affect our motivation, our self-efficacy, our self-worth, our willingness to take risks, as well as our desire to continue. I think it’s important to put ourselves in the shoes of students once in a while, to remember what these feelings—and their potency—are like. As we get older, there’s less of a demand on us to get out of our comfort zones. Kids are learning constantly: how to hold their own heads up, how to use forks, how to not run directly into oncoming traffic. As adults, we can usually opt out of uncomfortable learning experiences. When was the last time you tried to learn something? When was the last time you really struggled with a new skill or knowledge? When was the last time you failed—and it was public and someone else gave you a grade for it? One of the skills that’s important to me to teach in my religion courses is empathy, which I hope students will apply to the people and traditions we study. But this skill is applicable to us too. Experiencing our own failures can be a good reminder that students are people too and that they bring a mix of emotions into our classrooms, all of which affect their learning. This reminder may help us consider how we might, perhaps more delicately or kindly, facilitate those situations in which failure is possible or even inevitable.