Then & Now: Teacher's Edition

I met with three new college undergrad classes yesterday for the first time; one more starts next week. Ah, a new fall semester at Little Town U! And because I tried to pay attention, I had some “aha” moments about the contrast between walking into class in 1991-ish when I first started teaching, and walking into class yesterday...

Then: The first day of class is a happy lawn party. You get to take the class outside, sit in the grass, and wax philosophical with inquiring, like-minded friends.

Now: Your anxiety is so high by the first day of class (everything depends on student-consumer evaluations) that it causes spontaneous muscle spasms, which students confuse with clumsiness and/or senility. Your class is in the basement of the physics building. You like the dark; it hides your trembling.

Then: Wearing a calf-length paisley peasant skirt with white ankle-length silk long john bottoms sticking out, duct-taped Birkies, and a Jimi Hendrix t-shirt for the first day of class helps students relax and see you as their groovy, non-threatening older sister.

Now: Your all-black skirted ensemble and sensible black pumps strike fear into new students and help them focus on the fact that learning is not for the queasy or faint of heart.

Then: You distribute your 2-page syllabus—sprinkled with hand-drawn yin/yangs, happy faces, and quotes from Jung, Adrienne Rich and Joni Mitchell—at the very end of class, telling students to call if they have questions.

Now: You distribute your 18-page syllabus—sprinkled with state-required disclaimers, learning goals & outcomes, rubrics for academic writing, student services information, and state/university/department/course policies—at the beginning of class, and you spend the entire class making sure students understand their rights and responsibilities. You have them sign a “contract” documenting the fact that they’ve read and understand the syllabus.

Then: You open class by reading a poem about doing your own laundry for the first time. You spend some time laughing and chatting about the students’ lives, Japanese studies tying jumping to bone growth, and why Howard Jones is the genius king of techno-pop. Then you let class out early.

Now: You open class with the Ram Das quote, “Be here now,” explaining that being present in every moment of “our collective learning process” is worth xx participation points, but only if one’s cell phone is turned off before entering class. Then you go over the syllabus. You don’t quite finish, although class runs 5 minutes long.

Then: You hope all 30 of your students will be exuberant English majors by the end of the semester.

Now: You hope you to learn all 65 students’ names by the end of the semester.

Then: I love teaching.

Now. I love teaching.

This was yesterday’s most profound revelation—I still love teaching. In spite of the anxiety, the ever-increasing bureaucracy, heavier teaching loads, and customer-service orientation of higher ed, the sleepless weekends and nights hunched over the dining room table, and the occasional frustrations I heap on my whipping-boy, Ray (his patience is all the evidence I need of true love), I’m grateful to be doing what I do.

I do it for the occasional spark I see in a student, knowing I can fan it into an all-out brushfire. I do it for the moment a student crosses from confusion to clarity. I do it for the ex-students who still call, email, and FB me, some of them now with their own ex-students. I do it because sometimes I hear, out of the blue and many years later, from a student who suddenly realized she/he got something out of my class. I do it to sneak my fascination with language under the skin of pliant young people, where it will worm its way into their psyches. If someone else would do the grading, the job would be near-perfect.

So let the leaves turn. Let the September rains fall. Shake out the jackets. Trade the sandals for shoes. Bring on the heating pad, the coffee, and the Doritos. Come on, Semester. Let’s see what you’ve got.