We’re about 8 weeks into the semester, so we’re almost exactly halfway through the term. In my experience, the midterm is always where things start to fall apart a little bit. Students lose motivation as they days get shorter, the weather starts cooling off, assignments get harder, and they start to take high-stakes, GPA-defining tests that don’t always go the way they planned. Most of us are fully immersed in lens analysis and source integration: challenging topics for everyone, and maybe especially for students who had negative feelings about writing before they even met you. If a student is going to disappear, stop turning in work, or start to despair (and this hasn’t already happened), it often happens now.

One thing that I like to do around this time is to share with students about my own first-year college story and how UTTERLY FREAKED OUT I was for my first-year midterms. My transition into college was rough, and I really struggled with feelings of belonging because I didn’t know how to study, I felt like I was not absorbing anything I was reading, I was far away from home and didn’t really know anyone, and I was convinced that everyone around me had everything figured out already. But I made it out of my first year, and then through a whole other decade of school after that. And now I work in one!

Recently, I’ve been thinking about how to better integrate stories of struggle (and eventual triumph) into my first-year composition course–both my own, and the stories of current students and recent graduates–because of the compelling research on belonging.

A recent national study found that minoritized and first-generation students at four-year universities are much less likely to feel like they “belong” in college than their two-year college counterparts. And another recent study on an intervention designed to increase students’ feelings of belonging suggested that simply showing students examples of people who didn’t feel like they belonged at first but whose feeling later changed can help students to persist when the going gets tough (as long as there are additional resources in place to continue reinforcing those feelings of belonging past the initial intervention, I should say).

Stories like the ones in the #WeBelongInCollege campaign offer models from real college students and recent graduates about struggles that they’ve faced as working students, multiply marginalized students, students with disabilities, first-gen students, and more. These can help to show students that lots of people who go on to be successful in college initially feel like imposters or face setbacks. During conference hour this week, I showed my students a few of these, chosen strategically to echo some of the concerns that students have shared.

I will often also use this as a springboard to remind them about how many people care about them on the campus and are committed to making sure that they succeed and have a good experience here. I’ll remind them about the resources that we discussed in the first few weeks of class: FYE, the Knights Table food pantry, the Petrie emergency assistance grant, the Writing Center, counseling services. I’ll remind them about where they can find the info for that stuff on our course site, and encourage them to take advantage of all of these free resources while they have the chance to do this.

In years past, depending on the class, I will sometimes also facilitate a conference hours session where we talk in a small group about study tips, time management tips, and just general “we are all struggling and this is hard for everyone, even people who seem like they have it all together” commiseration. I will often reinforce that “study tips” will not add time to anyone’s day or make you know things that you don’t know any faster, but getting into some good habits can still be helpful to make things feel less overwhelming. Here are my slides, in case these are helpful.

Sometimes I’ll also do something called a KQS evaluation: a really quick, no-prep list of things that students want to Keep doing, Quit doing and Start doing, and what they’d like for the class to Keep doing, Quit doing or Start doing. Taking the general temperature of the room can help me to integrate students’ suggestions before the end of the semester when we get our course evaluations. For more suggestions about ways to structure more or less elaborate mid-term evaluations than this, check out this handout.

The bottom line is that the midterm can be an especially great time to remind first-year students that failing or screwing up in the first semester is not irreversible or an indication that they should just give up, that lots of people have struggled and ultimately figured it out, and that lots of people all around the campus are rooting for them. This reminder can really help students who are already struggling to get back on track, and can give students a welcome reminder that you’re in their corner.  It can also be a great time to gather some preliminary feedback and to clarify, reset, or celebrate your own practices that are already working really well.