This was a productive weekend. Cold, too, and snowy. I am back on campus on Wednesday, and I guess I am ready. I have been doing some thinking about journals. Not necessarily electronic ones, any kind of journal. Twice in my educational career I had teachers who assigned a journal. The first was in high school English class. The second was in my doctoral program in education. Those experiences made me an advocate for assigning a journal, and it is part of my classes every semester.

Most of the journals I receive are perfectly acceptable, if not inspired, exercises, some are kind of run-of-the-mill, mundane but OK, of course a few are pitiful, not serious efforts, but every so often, there is a student in class who really runs with the journal assignment, and hands in something heartfelt, that borders on creative writing.

I comment on the first half of the journals, and then return them, collecting them again at the end of the semester. A handful of students get them back after the class is over. Most do not care once the final course grade has been posted. I save them for a semester, then tear out the used pages and use the notebooks and binders myself. (I will never have to buy a spiral bound notebook again.)

Last semester there was a student who handed in a journal that was not only inspired - it revealed a lot of personal information (most of the creative ones do, but in this case, it was even more than usual). I soaked up the entries, and made positive comments, and looked forward to the second half of the semester's resubmission.

The second half was even more intensely personal. Some of the information shared was alarming. Not to the extreme of violence or suicide or anything, but the student had developed what seemed to me to be an unhealthy obsession with weight and diet. This student was in one of my on campus classes, and in my opinion, did not need to lose a pound. Given the other personal things she wrote, becoming anorexic was not out of the question.

She isn't one of the students who asked for her journal back, so additional comments would be pointless. The class is over now, the grades submitted. Whenever a situation such as this arises, I always wonder about my responsibility. College students are adults, even if at 20 they can be as vulnerable as kids. It's tempting to try to share some of what is learned from aging, not in an academic discipline, but in life. On the other hand, was is the proper role for a professor? Where should the line be drawn between helping, and it being none of your beeswax? Finally, with 250 students per semester, where can the line be drawn, realistically?

I suppose one can only hope that the exercise of journaling itself proves to be the gift, the healing.