Students are funny and great people. It's such an odd relationship to have with another person, to be someone's teacher. What a huge responsibility it is! They give me their unsureness, their vulnerability, their secret selves and ask me, am I ok?

Here's the situation: One of my distance students is going through the breakup of her marriage. Her husband left her four days before class started but I think he still lives at home. She wrote about how he goes out to strip clubs every night, now, and then comes home stinking of cigarettes and sex. She writes about how much she misses her husband. Everything she writes is about this overwhelming new development in her life and she can write. She's really good. This morning? Girlfriend just sent me pictures! Of her making out with her (ex)husband!

Isn't that crazy?

But it's also so touching. She wants me to see this big huge horrible thing she's going through, really see it and see her and see the bigness and horribleness of it all. She loved her husband and he loved her and she wants me to see. Lord, if that ain't the reason I love teaching, I don't know what is. They break my heart, they are so good.

I got another student in my awesome writing class whose parents put her in an orphanage when she was 12. She's only about 20 now and she plans on being a doctor. She's got two young kids and she is something else--so smart and so sad. Everything is right on the surface with her. I worry that she's got no protection against the hardness of the world, but then, I guess she's seen far more of the hardness than I ever had.

It's always the ones who have been hurt the worst who come with their arms wide open.

This writing class, the one I love, has turned into what always imagined a writing class could be. It's a real place and every single one of my students in there is thinking and sharing and figuring their shit out. And really writing, too. Learning how to translate their very selves into the written word, glory halleluiah.

I was listening to the radio last night, going to pick up Thai food for the work crew (When I came home yesterday afternoon the roof over the kitchen was off and it was beautiful--the sun streaming in through the slats. I wish we could leave it that way. Course it started raining and I remembered why roofs are good). So radio. They were talking about how the privileged classes in this country no longer join the military and how morally wrong that is. It's generally folks without money or education who need a job who make up the military, now. I do agree--this is wrong. It's easy to make foolish politically motivated decisions when you don't know what the hell you're talking about, when you got no skin on the line, nothing at stake except your job (which you don't even need to survive), when your kids are safe. I think required service is not a bad idea. We should all have to wrestle with this moral decision. We should all have to make a stand: would I be willing to go to war for my country or not? If not, how much am I willing to give up for that moral stand? Don't you think we should all be forced to at least really think about this stuff? Maybe for conscientious objectors there could be required Americorp service.

So many of my students are or were in the military and I think how those cowardly politicians play fast and loose with these folks--good people, the best. Get em to do the dirty work. It makes me sick. When I taught at the university it was so different--my students were mostly young and relatively privileged. I don't know that I ever had anyone who'd served in my classes. I'm glad I'm here, glad these folks are the ones I get to see every day (um, except for the assholes--who are, without fail, just out of high school and with parents paying their tuition).

Well, best get on with the day. I still got that damned grading to do and I still have to figure out what to say about those make out pictures.

Oh and also on that same radio program they did a whole hour on guess who? JEFF GANNON. That boy gets around! His picture is on the front page of salon.com. Heh.