Let 'em eat pawpaws

I'm sitting in my office scarfing down chunks of fresh pawpaw, thanks to my finicky Honors students. Our pawpaw harvest was not great this year but I had just enough to peel and slice and divide into little cups for my Honors Lit students, so they could get a taste of the sort of thing Inman might have eaten in the wild during his long trek to Cold Mountain. 

They were underwhelmed, to put it mildly. The pawpaws were ripe, fresh off the tree, soft and delicious, but two students didn't have the guts to try it, and many others took one bite and then dumped the rest in the trash. Did they at least have the courtesy to say thank you? No they did not. So I took the two untouched portions back to my office and ate them myself--yum!

Earlier, a student in my composition class told me that I'm the nicest professor she has, which inspired the response, "Great--now I'll have to do something mean just to prove that I'm not a pushover." Maybe I'll make them eat pawpaws.

In another class, students stare silently at their desks when I ask a question, avoiding eye contact as if it were lethal. That's the class where I have the most trouble remembering names, primarily because I never see their faces and they all appear to be variations on the same person--skinny athletes with long straight hair. Funny: overall, we have pretty good gender balance this year, but I have one class that's 75 percent male and another that's 90 percent female, and the women speak up so rarely in class that in my mind they've all merged into the same person. 

It occurs to me that I've broken one of the primary rules of pandemic teaching: masks required at all times inside buildings, and no food or drink in the classrooms. My students would have been happier if I hadn't brought them fresh pawpaws this morning, but chalk it up to a learning experience. At least they know what pawpaws smell like--and by the end of the day, so will everyone else in the building.