Today, by chance, through the Instagram address I had shared with a student, I went back into my own blog. There were many posts there. Among them were a relatively recent piece about donating hematopoietic stem cells, records of trying to pursue legal action after being defrauded on a secondhand marketplace, pieces written after reading books, and posts written while traveling in Europe. There were also records from my freshman and sophomore years of college more than a decade ago, so for a little while I took time to look back on the thoughts I'd had at the time. Among those scenes were memories that no longer remain vivid, and memories that still remain vivid enough that I can dimly describe what I was doing back then. Then, to show some more recent stories, I showed the student a few posts on Instagram, and the student said they read them. In the midst of this, it suddenly struck me, and I explained to the student that I haven't written much lately, and even when I do, I've never really shared it properly with anyone. After explaining, I thought I might at least write something, but in the end I took the wheel to drive home without settling on a proper topic. From the moment I took the wheel and the whole way home, I drove back pondering why I haven't been able to write recently — and not just recently, but since when the very act of writing became infrequent.
The thought that came to me as I parked the car in front of my house was this: many of the posts I wrote after getting a job at a school were mainly about 'students,' and I found my first reason in the fact that it has been a long time since I formed any deep relationship in the process of relating to those 'students.' It's already been three years since I last served as a homeroom teacher, and since I rarely keep in frequent — or even occasional — contact with students I once taught, the relationship with students was hard to make into something worth thinking about. When I read novels and books often, the novels and books I read became the subjects of my writing, so I wrote using them as material, and people still read those even today; but lately I find it hard to discover an interesting novel or even an interesting essay, and because so much writing online is AI-generated, it has long since stopped drawing my interest. Also, given my habit of deleting contacts once homeroom duty ends, I never get a chance to think about graduates unless they come to find me, or unless I happen to run into them outside — and I avoided it myself. Generally, by my educational philosophy, once the homeroom relationship ends, only the human relationship remains, and since that is a relationship that forms only when one side seeks the meeting, I set it aside for the time being; a few of my former students reached out, so those relationships remained, but beyond that there was nothing more to dwell on. When I think of the recent moment when I briefly considered contacting graduates in order to write, that was something I took on as a research project, and even then I intended to end it with about one or two meetings rather than contacting them often — so I felt this too was not something to post briefly somewhere, and I couldn't write it, and didn't, because I shouldn't have. But the reason I wrote a piece like this today is that, listening to the students' conversations, I found myself asking what kind of relationship I am aiming for with students, and I wanted to sort out that question.
The truth is that, because I'm such a task-oriented person, I usually don't want to talk about my human side and tend to talk mainly about lessons or literary works; but once they happen to see my blog posts or Instagram posts, they realize I'm not only that kind of person, so it gives me a little pause. Still, for the reasons mentioned above, I came home wondering whether there was some regret in the way I end up, in the end, not having deep conversations with ordinary students and finishing in a somewhat formulaic relationship — wondering whether better learning, in a good sense, happens when the relationship becomes more honest and human. I thought all this, but I still don't plan to talk much about my personal stories going forward. Even so, I felt I should challenge myself to read books a bit more and write again, as I used to. Because a book is a relatively free form of writing, it stimulates my brain far more than reading texts churned out by AI, so it is genuinely necessary — both in terms of developing and diversifying my linguistic expression, and in terms of enriching my thinking. Considering the student writing that will soon be churned out by AI, this really does seem necessary.
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