At the beginning of a recent online meeting, my interlocutors asked me, from their institutionally beige offices on campus, why my usually sunny backdrop had suddenly cooled to something gloomier.

I was hiding from the plague of insects, I told them, that was massing on the southern side of my clapboard house. Since the bugs were drawn to my screen like moths to a flame, I’d had to retreat to the darker north side. And we laughed about this briefly, before pressing on with the day’s agenda.

Yes, it’s that time of year again. Just like that – and whatever the political climate may be – it’s springtime in academe.

This is the season most flummoxing for the buttoned up and the battened down. Any experienced teacher can unfurl a yarn concerning nature’s most memorable intrusions into their springtime classroom. It’s the season for broad comedy and British-style farce, a time when the most carefully laid lesson plans go awry, and when the presence of a single wasp or bumblebee can send an otherwise serious class spiralling into chaos.

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One minute, a group of students is seated in front of the whiteboard debating Plato’s Symposium���ǰ���Springtime in Paris; the next, those same learners are sheltering under their desks to escape the buzzing sorties overhead. Meanwhile, a fly landing on the white-hot lens of the projector gets magnified a thousand times, lending the room the vibe of a B-movie horror flick. A beetle flying up the professor’s probiscis causes slapstick uproar. Class dismissed.  

But the truth is that even in the best of eras for higher education, we ache for such comic distractions at this time of year, as the academic year draws ever closer towards its exacting climax. We crave status quo-altering characters – the substitute teacher, the student trickster, the flash mob, the squirrel outside the window, too far out on a limb. We embrace the risqué YouTube video that runs unbidden before our educative clip, the professorial pratfall, technical or literal, that at any other time of year would leave us professionally embarrassed but now just triggers merry self-deprecation.

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And we are very quick to timetable a change of pedagogical gear. As a junior professor, I used to smile when, like clockwork, the word “presentation” or “guest speaker” would crop up in my colleagues’ end-of-the-year course calendars, crowding out more serious topics like so many dandelions. Back then, I was inclined to see this as a cop-out, but I now see it as a gesture of grace. Like those waiting for a bus that’s always near but never comes, students awaiting their exams embrace these opportunities to turn to their peers for consolation. And, really, what’s left to do at the end of the teaching year but to talk to one another, and to listen?

As for the students’ pleas to move the discussion outdoors, it is understood by all that the ad hoc session held on the lawn otherwise reserved for sunning or frisbee will end in chigger bites, bee stings, sunburn or some sundry wardrobe malfunction. But in the moment, the logic of “let’s go outside!” is a truth universally acknowledged, even by the most serious-minded pedagogues. Outside, half as much will be learned, though twice as much will be remembered.

The sudden warmth of the season also brings us back to our bodies, to the knowledge that love and death cannot be forestalled even for the sake of higher learning and intellectual ambition. Spring reminds that we are, after all, part of nature, and that the brain can never be the sole seat of wisdom.

The clothes we scholars are wont to hide behind in colder times, those comforting tweeds and tartans, must be shelved for something thinner and more down-to-earth. Absent our protective layers, we’re bound to feel naked at the lectern. But, then again, that’s the point. This is the season for every living thing, even those dedicated to the life of the mind, to cast off their security blankets and bask in the warming sun, if only for an instant.

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is professor of English at North Central College, Illinois.