“Have you found anything surprising?” my friend asks me.

I’ve been going through old files as I prepare to vacate my office, closing the door on a long career teaching Japanese literature.

“Oh, I don’t know. Just the usual.”

My file cabinets are packed full of meeting notes; back in the days when we kept notes; back in the days when we had meetings in person.

I have files on former students and files on former colleagues.

In one drawer I found a folder of handwritten letters from students. The other files I will need to destroy, but I think I’ll keep these letters.

Every so often (back in the old days) a student would send me a card to thank me for a letter of recommendation or to tell me about the graduate program they’d entered or the job they’d secured. These missives always surprised me. Writing recommendation letters is just part of the job! Still, I always appreciated the student’s thoughtfulness and was delighted to know that my efforts were noticed.

Now in the age of email, letters of thanks from students arrive electronically and are stored somewhere in the cloud. And like the cloud, they have lost the tactile sense I so enjoy in old letters: the loopy penmanship, the spelling mistakes scratched out, words that crept over the bottom of the card and onto the back when space ran out.

Occasionally it was the student who slipped through my classes without much fuss who bothered to send cards. The student I didn’t notice so much at the time. And now, here their kind expressions are in my files, their notecards pressed into memory.

I also have papers from former students, too many to keep. Since they are considered personal and confidential, I’ll have to shred them.

I don’t know why I hung onto those papers. I guess I always expected the student to come back for them. And then time passed, I tucked the papers in a file drawer, and there they stayed. Until now.

Back in the old days, before students submitted everything electronically, we would return their work to them after grading.

At the end of the semester, though, students left campus after submitting their final papers and never returned to collect their assignments.

For years I’d leave a box outside my office door with papers to return. Students would stop by to retrieve them, if they wanted to. Often that box would sit there for weeks, untouched, until I finally brought the papers back inside my office.

Eventually we were told we couldn’t leave papers out like that anymore. It violated confidentiality.

I’d email students to remind them to pick up their papers—individually.

I wanted them to collect their work because I had carefully left comments for them.

I wrote in the margins, corrected spellings, challenged unsupported assumptions, applauded clever turns of phrase, and encouraged elaboration of particularly lucid ideas. Often I filled the final page of the assignment, sometimes even the back of the page, with comments.

Excellent work! You’ve offered cogent insights into the novel. I especially appreciate the way you have made a case for the wife. Most scholars focus on the protagonist and his dilemma which, as you have pointed out, is really not that significant when compared to what his wife has had to endure!

I hope you will follow up on this further.

You might enjoy reading the novels of Enchi Fumiko, who is known for particularly allowing the wife’s story to take center stage. Why don’t you look at The Waiting Years?

Sometimes I felt I may have overwhelmed the paper with my comments!

In some cases, I may have worked even harder on the assignment than the student did!

These papers look so lonely now, separated by years from the youthful students who submitted them.

I wonder why they never returned to retrieve them.

At the end of the semester, shortly after they submitted their work, they were overwhelmed with other assignments and eager to get home.

When they returned to campus after the break, they probably forgot all about their earlier assignments.

They had seen their end-of-term grade on their transcripts. Perhaps that was all that mattered.

And now all that hard work is headed to the shredder!

I have a desk drawer full of grade books with green covers. Inside the pages are lined with tiny graphs. Somehow I managed to squeeze students’ names into those tiny boxes. And next to the names are smaller boxes filled with numbers representing the grades they made on certain assignments.

I used a calculator back then.

The end of the semester was always a mad rush to tally grades.

I was never very good at figuring out what percentage the midterm carried or the final. Math was my nemesis, so the calculator was my friend and a critical tool.

Times have changed, of course.

Now students submit all of their papers online. My comments, too, are rendered electronically.

It’s for the best, I suppose. Lately my handwriting has deteriorated—and so has that of the students! When I ask them to write something out freehand during class, I have to struggle to decipher what they’ve scrawled.

We do all our grading online now, too, with gradebooks that automatically calculate marks. No more late nights with calculators.

Still, I miss the “good old days” when students submitted hardcopies, and I could write by hand in the margins. There was something just more intimate about the process; something more tangible.

Like those handwritten cards.

Even now I get one from time to time.

They still make me smile.