Today I sum up my courses at Penn State for our final day of class. We’ll never be together like this, in the same way, again.
I remind them about the verb and the semicolon, the colon and the comma. We talk about dashes and parentheses. We recall what it meant to write with authority, good timing, and smart logic.
We talk about what they alone can say.
We talk about what essays made us most proud and all the ways our writing improved.
I send them off into their lives, and just as I sigh with the loss of them, I receive an email from a student who is already sending his little sister my way.
They move on, but I stay here.