It seems impossible to me to not be aware of my students as embodied beings. My experience of the world is so very much shaped by my shape. As my body moves through space, I feel the cold wind on my head after I’ve cut my hair, the rock in my shoe, the way people look at me or don’t. I notice the differing sensation of talking to someone who is shorter than me as opposed to someone taller. Indeed, I remember not long ago, one of my students came up to me after class and loomed above me. I shrank a moment from him, reflecting what it must be like to be shorter than most of your students. And that, even for all my noticing, how carelessly I still use my height. How much I take for granted the respect I receive for being a tall, white male with a reasonably low voice.

I notice too how one of my students came to my office the other day and sat across the room from me, choosing the furthest chair and spending the first five or so minutes hiding behind his hair. He has spoken to me of his debilitating anxiety and though we call it invisible, to me at that moment it was writ all over his body, from how he sat to how he pulled his shirt from his chest, to how and when he moved his hair.

When I stand in class, I am aware of my own body too. How I move, where I will put my hands when I talk, where I will put my feet when I sit. I experience moments of discomfort as I reach past a student to take a paper from a student sitting behind them. Is my crotch in their face? Is there some better way to collect papers?

I tend to move and shuffle in the room and I wonder how it comes across. I don’t know how real I am too my students. How they see me.

It feels like a strange line that we are on as well. Something inherently risky in speaking of bodies. In revealing that I notice them. For wouldn’t it be problematic for me to speak here of attraction? Who in the class has those elusive features (symmetry? body-type? health and fitness?) that we call attractive. But believe that I notice that too.

And what does it mean to notice these things. Do I treat those students (or peers or faculty) that I have been culturally conditioned to think of attractive with preference? Psychological studies would suggest that we all do.

So how do we break those things down? How do we notice without assigning value? How do we, as McRuer might say, make those observations less coherent?