I spend a lot of time wishing I was writing poetry, looking for topics, jotting down inspirations, scanning the interior landscape for my own, special tree. Oddly enough, in quest of poetry to read and to write I continually end up with ideas for teaching.
I am not a confident teacher—though I move sure-footed through my tutoring. Self-doubt is my most persistent pedagogic muse—glaring like an unfriendly district superintendent over my shoulder at every move, asking: Are you in control? Why don’t ;you get them to stop playing computer games? What did that teach them? Why haven’t they improved? Why do they hate this assignment?
I like my experience with students to feel like a social hour with me as host but able to command my guests and that way still accomplish a lot. This oxymoron traps me repeatedly. Wanting to mother, it seems I often alienate. After all, these are usually 18 year olds anxious to shed parental oversight. What they want is someone other, perhaps, a bit more exotic, less accessible, even scarier. It’s not a persona I adopt easily.
It’s summer now. I look forward to teaching, in spite of my trepidations. I stockpile articles and books on pedagogy, I read and re-read textbooks, trying to match their version of learning with mine and what I think my students will respond to. I’m likely to be wrong again in some cases. I know I’ll encounter those who don’t get me and many, perhaps, whose progress as writers is incremental at best.
But I don’t want to stop. And I continue to believe I’ll improve.
