I didn’t set out to redesign my teaching philosophy by reading the backs of exam papers. For years, I’ve taught nursing students in lecture halls large enough to swallow faces and names. Like many faculty, I’ve embraced—sometimes enthusiastically, sometimes warily—the growing calls for relationship-rich education, eloquently articulated by the book by Peter Felten and Leo Lambert of the same title. Their work urges us to see learning not as a transaction but as a human relationship: reciprocal, contextual, and personal. I agreed with the premise. And I try very hard to get to know my students, beyond simply remembering their names.

Then there were the honor codes.

Up until recently at my institution, each student signs a paper honor code at the start of an exam, an attestation to academic integrity, collected when the test ends. The back of that sheet doubles as scratch paper. During exams, while proctoring (imagine me walking around the classroom like a museum guard, hoping no one touches the art), I began to notice something curious. Some students who were done with the exam early doodled as they waited for the rest to finish. Others wrote notes to themselves, seemingly unrelated to the exam. At first, I barely noticed it. Faculty are trained to look through such moments, not at them.

A parallel curriculum

But curiosity, that quiet engine of teaching, eventually won. When I began reading what students had written on the backs of those honor codes, I discovered a parallel curriculum unfolding in pencil and ink. One student had written a to-do list for an upcoming trip and dinner menu, rendered in clipped, haiku-like lines. Another transcribed, from memory, the full lyrics of the old standard “Blue Moon,” each verse carefully spaced, as if the page were a stage. Someone else wrote, in German, a line from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem The Book of Hours, Lass dir Alles geschehn: Schönheit und Schrecken—Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. A few students offered themselves quiet encouragement: You can do this. Breathe. Almost there. Don’t be insecure. One filled the page with the names of countries in alphabetical order, a cartography of calm. Another reflected, in earnest prose, on how much they looked forward to becoming a nurse.

The drawings were just as revealing. Cartoons and caricatures shared space with intricate mandala-like figures, effervescent bubbles, and dreamy fairies. Some students wrote their names over and over, each time larger, bolder, as if reaffirming their own presence. There were starbursts and sunbursts everywhere, radiating lines that seemed less decorative than expressive, small explosions of nervous energy or hope.

Reading what wasn’t meant for me

And yet, there it was, returned, unbidden, entrusted to a faculty member who had only asked students to uphold the rules of an exam. Reading these notes gave me a glimpse, brief but unmistakable, into the complex interior lives of my students. These weren’t just future nurses mastering content, but people carrying grocery lists, love songs, languages, aspirations, and anxieties into the testing room. In a profession that rightly emphasizes competence and grit, it was a reminder of something equally essential: the inner lives that sustain people through difficulty.

For faculty who teach large classes and are perpetually short of time, one-on-one connection can feel like a luxury. Office hours go unattended. Conversations are transactional: grades, registration, tutorial. And yet, perusing these scribbles, these accidental artifacts, became, for me, an unexpected way of encountering student humanity beyond exam scores. It made me more attuned to the uniqueness of students’ gifts beyond nursing. The lyricist. The linguist. The artist. The meticulous list-maker. The dreamers rehearsing their future in ink.

I beg your pardon

I worried that reading these notes was a kind of eavesdropping, peering into someone’s daydreams without consent. I wondered if I was violating ethical standards. Students didn’t write with an audience in mind. These notes aren’t data to be analyzed, nor confessions to be acted upon. They’re revelations, not invitations. But perhaps my worry is instructive. Relationship-rich education, as Felten and Lambert remind us, requires attentiveness and humility. It asks educators to notice without possessing, to care without intruding. The goal is not to know everything about our students, but to remain open to their fullness as human beings.

A more than marginal loss

Sadly, my school has transitioned to an electronic honor code, closing this accidental window into my students’ inner lives—a small but telling loss in our steady march toward efficiency. What the honor codes taught me, ironically, through the margins of an assessment designed to maintain exam integrity, is that students are never empty vessels waiting to be filled with information. They arrive already full of stories, languages, music, obligations, fears, and hopes. Learning happens not when we pour knowledge into them, but when we recognize them as co-discoverers, partners in the fragile, powerful magic of human connection.

In a time when higher education feels increasingly transactional, perhaps the quietest moments offer the deepest lessons. Sometimes, getting to know our students doesn’t require a new initiative or another committee. Sometimes it begins by noticing what they write when they think no one is looking, and allowing that recognition to soften how we teach, how we assess, and how we care.

Fidelindo Lim, DNP, CCRN, FAAN is a Clinical Associate Professor at New York University Meyers College of Nursing.