I've been helping students again, which means I've been thinking deeply about important issues. I so love my job.

If someone came up to you on the train and asked you to defend your faith, what would you say? That was the assignment for student one, a young Christian woman at a Christian college. She has been learning some shocking things about the Bible--parts were left out (the Apocrypha), translations vary, and even if you are absolutely certain it is the word of God, people wrote it and they are fallible. She's not threatened by this information; she wants to learn everything she can about the Bible, but she still doesn't have a good way to explain inconsistencies or when or whether it's ethical to pick and choose passages. I told her the story of Rabbi Hillel:

When asked by a man to relate all the Torah had to say while standing on one foot, Hillel replied, "Do not do unto your neighbor what you would not have him do until you; this is the whole Law; all the rest is commentary. Go and learn it."

I realized after I told her the story, that it had formed my basis for gaining wisdom from the Bible--figure out the core values and don't sweat the small stuff.

A Master's Degree in English can give you the power to change the entire society. That's the thesis of my student who is writing her letter of intent to get into an English program grad school. She happens to be from Saudia Arabia and is making the case that the critical thinking involved in analyzing texts translates into critical thinking about all aspects of society and the American and British novels that she will be teaching as a professor in her country will open her students' eyes to other ways of being in the world, particularly ways that respect and empower women. She wrote an excellent analysis of A Doll's House that could be a testimonial to this point.

Our society is so down on the liberal arts: studying novels is just navel gazing; it doesn't contribute to society the way doctor, lawyer, and business person do. Reading her essay reminded me of some of the reasons I care so deeply about literature. Of course, in grad school I found myself more fascinated by compositional studies and creative writing, but now I can better defend the arts.

A black woman and a white woman sat down to discuss Peggy McIntosh's "Unpacking the Knapsack of White Privilege." I'm the white woman in this story. The black woman is a student my own age who grew up in Alabama and is currently studying for her Bachelor's of Nursing. The article makes the case that racism is not just unfair oppression of people of color but the unfair elevation of white people. White people think they live in a meritocracy where hard work and talent pay off. Actually, white people walk around with an invisible knapsack of privilege--they can ask to speak to the boss and assume the person will be of their race; they can forget their wallet and it will be assumed they will come back and pay; they have the speech patterns of the people in power. I actually read this article in 1991 when a poetry grad school professor passed it out, and it was not new news to me. I had been studying this as part of my feminist undergrad studies. But, revisiting with my student made it all more real, more powerful, and more terrifying. She also told me her daughter had been called the N word at a Seattle school in the north end. In other words, this is happening right now in my hometown.

What my students get from me is structure, elaboration, transitions, and grammar. They also get my genuine interest, which is just as important in helping them become great writers. What I get from them is the world.