What To Worry About

So it began.

The mad crush for parking. The confusion of wandering a foreign campus. The trembling schedule printouts in the hands of sweating students.

School is back in session.

This will be my third year of teaching English at MTSU, and I'm pretty excited, no less than for the fact that by the third year a little magical something happens.

You realize you're not a student anymore.

Okay, okay, maybe it's just me. But for my first two years of teaching, I sweated bullets because I felt like some come-uppity imposter teaching peers. I've always had a babyface, always enjoyed being around college students, and for that reason I couldn't scratch up enough esteem to consider myself much older, or wiser, for that matter.

But this year, I wanted to change that. And something sparked that told me I could.

I was sitting in a flush of other teachers during orientation when I overheard two seasoned teachers comparing notes on their classrooms. As I listened to their conversation I was struck by what the conversation came back to: the teachers themselves. One of the teachers began chatting furiously, defending her teaching methods and why she wanted them to think well of her.

I thought about that.

Probably the most terrifying thought I had when I stepped into my first classroom was "What will they think of me?" The thought of being "that" teacher to a student, the one that's remembered for being unprofessional,lazy, unfair, and angry, made me want to pass out.

But what I soon found out was that the more I worried about myself, the less interested the students seemed, the less engaged they were. Yet when I focused on them and listened to them, their work was interesting, good, and worthwhile.





That's what good teaching means. That's what being the grown up, the classroom leader, means.


And that's what I thought about when I went into class today. I had my notes ready in a PowerPoint, and I had a syllabus composed. And when I thought about screwing up my notes or mispronouncing something, my hands went a little colder,and my voice shook,

But when I looked them in the face, when I asked them questions, when I took an extra second to listen, my body warmed up, my hands relaxed, and I started having fun.

No, I'm not a student anymore, and I'm trying to learn to be a grown up and a teacher. A far as what students think about me, hm, well, in some respects I cannot control that. But I have learned that when I make my focus a good lesson, a good discussion, an honest interaction, between them and myself, those other things tend to take care of themselves.

Happy First Day of the Semester, MTSU! Let's see what you've got for me this year.