Upon my return to teaching this past Fall semester after my 2023-24 sabbatical, I often fielded this question from colleagues. Given my proposal submitted to CIE and the Educational VP the previous spring, my answer usually went something like this: I wrote a lot of personal essays; I took a couple online writing workshops; I learned how to draw in ART 121. 

As I intended, I became a student again, showing up for classes, instructors, and my own ongoing work and writing routines. I enrolled in Zoom writing workshops in Fall 23 and Spring 24, amidst classmates I didn’t know from around the country and instructors I had to learn to trust quickly in the span of six- or ten-weeks. I spent regular time in the college’s art studio during Fall 23 semester, getting feedback on my drawings before my colleagues Glenn Wolff and Rufus Snoddy both retired. I learned to auto-belay at Elev8, the local indoor climbing gym (an activity not pitched in my sabbatical application, but another opportunity, thanks to an EES employee discount). 

Which means I learned how to do things: hard things, new things, sometimes both things. I practiced awkwardly, made mistakes, felt confused and anxious and stressed by deadlines and increasing degrees of difficulty.  As a friend observed, I was learning how to be comfortable with discomfort, the underlying premise I realized of one of my stated sabbatical goals: to empathize with my students who–like all of us–live complicated lives so often hidden from others. I figured if I could persist–in the face of my own uncertainty, errors, stumblings, fears of failure or rejection–I was bound to grow.

What I didn’t expect was that by learning how to show up regularly (Tuesday and Thursday mornings to art studio; Tuesday nights to weekly Zooms; Friday mornings to the climbing gym; every day to my own blank sketchbook page or empty Google doc–or an essay draft that wasn’t working or had just been declined by a literary journal), despite my own doubts and misgivings, I was honing the skills needed for an entirely different kind of education because of yet one more experience that occurred unexpectedly and defined the latter half of my sabbatical year: getting a breast cancer diagnosis near the end of December 2023.

*** 

Our culture and society–and hence, our educational system–is driven by productivity, preoccupied by results and accomplishment. Even though linguistically, “sabbatical” suggests “sabbath” or “rest,” it isn’t immune from strategic goals, objectives, and outcomes: witness the application process to get the sabbatical, and the reporting thereafter of progress, achievement, or consequential impact. Thus the question “What did you do on your sabbatical?” feels loaded, and an article like this (which I put off writing during the Fall 24 semester despite Janet Lively’s polite inquiries) seems an exercise in, well, justification.    

So. I published some pieces during my sabbatical, including an essay in the Summer 2023 issue of the local literary journal The Dunes Review about coping as a teacher with the 2016 suicide of my student, combat veteran Drew Kostic; and this short essay in January 2024, in which I recalled a moment from my own college study-abroad experience. Yet while publication is an ostensible goal, I’ve learned to take writerly satisfaction in the glimmerings of a question or inkling I’m curious about shaping; the rejections I’ve collected for essays (the initial sting of disappointment fades); the waiting on other pieces still out there in some editor’s queue. But really: how to quantify such things? 

And how to quantify my pride in the drawings I made for Glenn’s art class, not so much because they were a lot better than I could have imagined they ever could be, but mostly because they were genuine responses to invitations from him to do what seemed impossible to me at first: draw shiny metal and glass objects in pencil and graphite? create a charcoal self-portrait? make 30-second, 1-minute, 10-minute crayon sketches of a live model draped in fabric? use Bic pens for a detailed ink drawing? What I realized, after I was no longer in Glenn’s class, was that I wasn’t actually learning how to draw, so much as I was learning how to see. 

***

On the first day of classes this past Fall 24 semester, I had been up front with my students about my cancer treatment during my introduction, because I think it’s worthwhile for me as a teacher to normalize life challenges. And interestingly, given this experience, I found myself able to recognize different aspects of students that I probably never really registered before. Some examples: After a difficult first project, an ENG 112 student who had been absent told me about his father’s recent cancer diagnosis. Mid-semester, I overheard another student telling her classmate during class break about chemotherapy she had received a couple years ago. In the hurried gap between Thanksgiving and Finals, while I was checking in with students on their essay progress in my Tuesday afternoon ENG 111 section, a student said to me, “I saw you last Friday,” which caught me off guard. “You did? Where?” I asked. “At Cowell,” she answered, adding, “I was there with my mom.” Only then did I realize that she was a caregiver for a family member with cancer, which explained the broader context of her challenges that semester.  

When students come into my classes after absences, wearing face masks as they get over colds, I am grateful. Cancer treatments have rendered me immunocompromised.  

***

My routine mammogram–that annual obligatory inconvenience–did what it was supposed to do: it caught something that needed attention, illuminating for the radiologist a mass they recognized as potentially cancerous. That, in turn, resulted in a sequence of events that finds me now at my one-year-anniversary of February surgery last year to remove my tumor, revisiting the question, “What did you do on your sabbatical?”  

The real underlying question perhaps: “What did you learn from your sabbatical?” 

My answer: I learned to draft and revise constantly; to differentiate between drawing what I think I see versus what I actually see; to climb up a wall, and to fall down it; to regroup when I slip, get rejected, or mess up. I learned to embrace beginner’s mind. Mistakes are opportunities for growth, after all. This is what I sought in my sabbatical and experienced.

But clearly, I learned from what I didn’t seek out as well. Throughout various waiting and exam rooms in Munson Hospital and Cowell Cancer Center this past year, I learned to ask for clarification, explanation, second opinions, and support. Outside the healthcare system, I learned to ask for help and perspectives from the community around me which expanded exponentially through my cancer treatment–which expands to this day, as I continue to become aware of those experiencing (and those impacted by) cancer. 

My biggest lessons? It’s a matter of seeing that which isn’t visible at first. Giving ourselves permission to try, in spite of everything there is. And sometimes–most times maybe–what we learn is not what we expect.