What we do as teachers, especially those of us in higher education, is usually invisible. The curricular development and day-to-day planning, among other things, seem to just happen. Sometimes it feels like we’re lip synching for our lives at the front of the classroom, the lyrics lying dormant inside our brains until we’re expected to perform–and then we’re pulled off stage.

That means that students don’t really know what we do outside of class, and sometimes it seems like we are arbitrarily asking them to do things without regard to the time and effort that goes into reading for class and doing assignments. By the way, that is not true. We try to space things out humanely, but there’s only so much we can do within 15 weeks, especially since students are often taking four or five classes at a time. As thoughtfully as I might try to pace my class, there’s no way that I or any other professor can take into account, in real practical terms, everything else that students are doing for other classes.

For transparency and reciprocity’s sake (and a bit of camaraderie), I’ve decided to complete the assignments I expect my students to do this semester–and post them here. The caveat is that I won’t always be able to do these assignments as fully as I would if I were a student. It also means that I may take some liberties here and there (let’s say poetic license). Lastly, I won’t be able to publish these posts at the same time that the real assignments are due in class. But, I’ll try to do a version of them as quickly as I can.

The first written assignment for my class was to write a reflection responding to the question “what is love?” Below is my idiosyncratic response to that question, a response that in no way adheres to the requirements I set for the assignment.

Regarding Love

• Love requires work. Love is labor. True love is reciprocal.
  • Though sometimes love is easy, breezy, like Maybelline.  Also, it can be one sided. And though frustrating, one sided love lingers through time so much so that every once in a while you think about that boy in ninth grade or that other boy in tenth grade, the ones who didn’t know you existed (not that way).
• Love requires respect. As when you respect your mother or father. Or yourself.
  • Unless of course you don’t respect anyone or yourself. Or when love is tawdry and incomplete. When you’re fumbling through it. Intense but over before you arrive.
• Love most undoubtedly requires good chemistry, good sex.
  • Except if you’re asexual. Or if sex is a chore. Or you just don’t like it (not as a concept but as an activity). Or, you know, if you’re related. Then sex is a no no.
• Love requires adrenaline. It starts off furious, heart pounding, cold sweaty, nausea riddled. Then it shifts back and forth between recognition and despair.
  • But it can start off slowly, sleepily, demurely. Until one day you realize you’re in the throes of it. And then what do you do?
• Love requires time. It is a posteriori. It exists only in the aftermath. You know it best once you’ve lost it. Or it’s been taken from you. Or death robs you of it. Or when you’ve been abandoned.
  • A notable exception is when you’re fully present and feeling it by yourself or your loved ones. But these moments are fleeting and should be met with skepticism. Only when there’s community can this kind of immersive love be sustained.
• Love requires generation. Begetting more of itself from itself. Sometimes it begets other people, though that’s not necessary (and honestly seems a little much?). It sets of a chain reaction of more and more love.
  • Of course, love can be privation. Either self imposed or imposed on us by others. Sometimes we deprive others of happiness, liberty, and life to hold on to it. Love kills.
• Love requires building a great edifice, a chain of being tying you and yours together, pushing and pulling. Thus, does love create the future.
  • Except when love moves you to tear everything down. Your life, your home, your country, your planet.
• Love requires kindness and empathy and self sacrifice. Maybe too much self sacrifice. Scratch the self sacrifice.
  • The above is true at all times–though sometimes love means being ruthless to yourself and others. You may have to consume, regurgitate, and scarf back down again your loved ones. Just so you can survive, so that you won’t.
• Love requires believing in the future.
  • Unless you can only have it in the rearview mirror.
• Love is not contradictory, not really. It is a dialectic, one that is perpetually iterative, resisting resolution. Any attempt to synthesize this dialectic, to dissolve its tension, is an attempt to flatten what is most human in us.