Tiburon native’s graphic novel chronicles teaching amid pandemic while battling cancer

Editor’s note — This article won second place for best profile in the California News Publishers Association’s 2023 California Journalism Awards.

Adam Bessie likens teaching to improv. On a good day in the classroom, his community-college students are bouncing ideas off each other, sharing their perspectives freely and taking the lesson in unpredictable directions, generating an electricity he says is palpable.

So when the pandemic hit in March 2020 and forced the longtime Diablo Valley College English teacher to abruptly pivot to online classes, the change felt cataclysmic. The vibrant classroom that thrived on synergy between students was now relegated to Zoom, where students were confined to tiny boxes and could turn off their video and microphones with a click of the mouse.

Bessie, who grew up in Tiburon and now lives in Hercules, felt immediately compelled to document what was happening.

“I just knew from this moment, education’s going to be different,” says Bessie, 42. “This moment of crisis is going to change forever how we do things in the classroom.”

He turned to his preferred medium of expression — comics. Bessie has been an avid fan of graphic novels and comic books since he was a kid, and as a comic writer himself has had his work published in outlets including the New Yorker, the Atlantic and the Los Angeles Times.

Those comics he began scripting in the early days of the pandemic eventually turned into his debut graphic memoir “Going Remote: A Teacher’s Journey,” which traces the pandemic’s effects on Bessie and his students while ruminating on the larger effects of the loss of community and the corporatization of public education. Also woven into the memoir, which is illustrated by Bessie’s frequent collaborator Peter Glanting, is Bessie’s personal battle with cancer. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor more than a decade ago and was receiving treatment throughout the pandemic.

The book, which comes out May 16, has already earned a coveted starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, which also named it to its spring 2023 list of top 10 graphic novels and comics. Bessie is set to discuss the book at an event at Book Passage in Corte Madera May 21.

Bessie spent his entire childhood in Tiburon, where he attended Reed Union School District schools and often helped out at the family business; his parents, David and Carolee Bessie, were the longtime owners of the Tiburon Physical Therapy Center on Ark Row. He would take whatever money he earned there and head a couple doors down to The Attic, a collector’s shop, where he’d play video games and read X-Men comics with his peers.

“That is really where my love of comics came from,” he says, noting that he enjoyed the way he could immerse himself in the stories and identify with the characters, in addition to the sense of community that came from connecting with other people who liked the same thing.

As an adult, he says, he began to better appreciate how graphic novels can help engage people in topics that might otherwise feel complex and how inclusive the stories have become. He even helped create and teaches a class at Diablo Valley College that examines graphic novels as literature.

“There’s stories for everybody, and it’s really exciting to see the same sense of community around comics that brings people in,” he says.

After graduating from Redwood High School, Bessie went on to study English at the University of California at Davis. He knew he wanted to be a writer and started out in music journalism in San Francisco; however, he quickly found it was difficult to make ends meet. He started taking substitute-teaching jobs throughout Marin as a flexible way to make some extra money, and he found himself drawn to the classroom.

After attending graduate school at San Francisco State University, he decided he wanted to work with older students. He did some training at a community college and “fell in love with it immediately.” Bessie says he’s always valued the community-college system as providing an opportunity to students who might not otherwise be able to attend college, including his own father, who enrolled in community college after returning from the Korean War.

He notes he loves teaching students of a variety of ages from all different backgrounds.

“Teaching for me is in the middle of the Venn diagram of being creative, being expressive and helping people,” he says, adding that it’s “personally satisfying to really see students be able to achieve.”

Everything appeared to be going to plan for Bessie; he was engaged to his now-wife, Corin Greenberg, who teaches at Redwood High School, and was interviewing for full-time tenure-track professor position, with thoughts of starting a family on the horizon. Then, at age 28, Bessie was diagnosed with a brain tumor about the size of a golf ball — a “shocking interruption” to the life he’d envisioned, he says.

It’s a diagnosis he’s been navigating ever since. He’s had one brain surgery that removed most of the tumor, but he alternates between periods of stable health and needing to treat the cancer again. He’s been on oral chemotherapy, undergone radiation and is now on an experimental treatment he says is working “fabulously.” He says he has an MRI about every three months.

“It’s been just a feature of my life that sometimes takes up more presence and sometimes is more in the background,” he says.

His diagnosis was very much in the foreground when Bessie stepped on to Diablo Valley College’s campus for the spring 2020 semester, with the pandemic looming. He was returning from an eight-month sabbatical taken in part to undergo chemotherapy and in part to chronicle the story of having a family while living with a life-threatening illness; he and Corin are parents to an 11-year-old son.

While he says he was nervous to be back on campus, he quickly settled into old rhythms. In a strange twist of unintentional foreshadowing, he was teaching a unit entitled “The End of the World as We Know it: The Literature of the Apocalypse” as part of his class in March 2020, with students discussing E.M. Forster’s 1909 short story “The Machine Stops,” in which humans are living isolated and interact with each other only on screens because they are in fear of toxic air.

“I was teaching that right as the world fell apart,” he says.

When word came down that classes were going virtual, Bessie recalls one student telling him they’d never done online school before.

“I said, ‘Guess what? Me neither, we’re going to do this together,’” he says.

Living with cancer, Bessie says, he’s used to navigating uncertainty in his personal life. However, with the pandemic, that uncertainty suddenly was very present in his professional life as well.

He says he saw the mental-health toll the pandemic was taking on students almost immediately — and the resulting increased pressure that placed on teachers, who were now tasked in many ways with guiding students through crisis. While he says he always thought of himself as a teacher students felt comfortable talking to, the number of students in crisis confiding in him “went up dramatically” amid the pandemic, and he often didn’t feel prepared to help them in the ways they needed.

“I started to feel during the pandemic like I was a bad IT worker and a bad social worker all at the same time,” he says.

In late 2020, he joined his college’s Campus Assessment, Response and Evaluation, or CARE, team, which aims to serve students experiencing homelessness, mental-health issues, family crises and more.

“I’ve learned how to be a really good conduit and connect (students) to resources,” he says. “That was something that was important before the pandemic but is now an essential part of the practice.”

“Going Remote” lays out some of the nagging worries and doubts plaguing teachers throughout the pandemic, with Bessie noting that the very students community college was designed to support — English-language learners, first-generation college students and socioeconomically disadvantaged students — are those “most likely to be left behind in the exodus online.”

“Who will return?” Bessie asks in the book. “Who will never come back?”

The memoir notes that teachers and students alike were suddenly cast as subjects in the “great Zoom-school experiment.” He expresses a wariness toward the corporatization of public education, noting that “tools built by for-profit, publicly traded Silicon Valley corporations suddenly became mandatory” and writing of fears that online learning is “flattening human students into passive, compliant consumers.”

While he writes that Zoom didn’t invent problems plaguing public education — namely “inequity, standardization and corporatization” — it made them “painfully visible.”

Bessie says he was about 60% through the memoir when his doctors told him that he would need to undergo treatment for his brain tumor again. Writing about his cancer experience has always been helpful to process what’s happening, he says, and it made sense to weave that experience into the book, where the tumor is drawn by Glanting as a small, vacant-eyed blob.

“Creating things has been a part of my own personal therapeutic regime,” he says.

Bessie says one of the central questions he poses in the book is, “What is going to be the future of teaching?” post-pandemic.

He doesn’t yet have an answer.

“I think fundamentally we’re still in this moment of transformation of, ‘What is community college going to be?’” he says.

He’s back on the Diablo Valley College’s Pleasant Hill campus teaching in-person and hybrid courses, and while he notes the campus is more lively than it has been, “it’s still not anything like the boisterousness before the pandemic.”

And while he acknowledges that leveraging some pandemic technology tools in the classroom can be helpful in meeting students where they are, he does still have concerns about the long-term impacts of the pandemic on what fundamentally drew him to teaching in the first place: the sense of community on campus.

He notes that during the pandemic, he and many of his colleagues were questioning what they were doing and if their methods were even working anymore.

“I think that those questions are good, I think we really need reinvention right now,” he says. “But that reinvention to me really needs to be driven from the lens of what the teachers and students really want and need and be driven through the lens of community.”

However, he says, he does feel optimistic about the future, as he’s seeing students back on campus and re-energized. He points to a recent class of his where students who didn’t know each other before are now all attending one student’s wedding.

“Moments like that make me feel like this is going to survive,” he says.

Reach Assistant Editor Emily Lavin, The Ark’s education and youth reporter, at 415-944-3841.