On Teaching
Note: This essay was published in a less-edited form in Michigan Quarterly Review, 2013. I quit teaching in 2014.
1.
I have finished making two copies of the motivational bookmarks intended to help me through another year of teaching required writing courses to college undergraduates. This is what the bookmarks say, phrases staggered across the horizontal plane, each in a different fancy font:
Sit with anger, loss, & panic.
Remember impermanence.
Observe. Listen.
These phrases amalgamate my summer reading: Pema Chodron, Charlotte Joko Beck, Thomas Moore, and others. I’ve printed one bookmark on bright yellow, one on cornflower blue, and I’ve laminated both with contact paper. One will mark my place in the course textbook; the other will float from book to book or perhaps be taped on my bathroom mirror.
2.
This is my eighth year of teaching, my first year of motivational bookmarks. I began teaching for my MFA graduate assistantship at Penn State University in 2002, one or two freshmen composition classes a semester for three years. After I graduated, I taught one or two classes a semester in addition to tutoring and administrative duties. Last year, I returned to the English department full-time and began teaching three classes in the fall, four in the spring.
If I’d made bookmarks before this year, they would have read, “If it scares you and you hate it, you should do it.” I used to think this showed a strong character, but now I wonder if I’m just a masochist. I try for a More Positive Attitude, and yet every year I find myself on the same path, carrying my cross into a new semester, a martyr bent not by love but by ineffectual rage (e.g., grading rage, lesson plan rage, dumb questions rage, road rage, sidewalk rage, parking lot rage, ugly office rage, long walks to classes rage, bad grocery-packer rage, too-many-people-texting-me rage, ad infinitum).
I should note that in the summer, when I’m not teaching, most of these rages magically disappear.
3.
School starts tomorrow. I have a Tuesday/Thursday schedule this semester, so I’ll see three classes of 24 students each for a total of 72 students two times a week, for a total of 144 contacts per week, not including office hours. This is the lightest schedule possible. This past spring, I taught four classes of 24 students each, on a Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule. I’ve heard tales of adjuncts at smaller colleges teaching 5/5 loads. I try to be grateful. I try to remember that I’m not alone in my misery. But then I think, maybe I’m alone in my misery. Maybe other people actually enjoy teaching. Maybe they’re digging a trench and finding specks of gold along the way, and I’m just digging a trench. Bookmarks, anyone?
4.
I don’t laminate well. Even when I pencil lines to guide my scissors, I can’t cut true; my two strips of contact paper vary slightly in size, calling for more trimming, greater chance of jagged edges. Now I’m not sure I chose the best four mottos to get me through this semester. Perhaps “breathe” or “abandon hope” would have created the more perfect alchemy for transformation.
5.
If I could only anticipate instead of participate, I’d be in the world’s top 5% of excellent teachers. I love making To Do lists. I like to see all of the tasks written neatly in a column on a blank piece of white paper. I make lists daily, weekly. But again and again, I learn that the real is never so orderly. Again and again, I am surprised and hurt by this revelation. I just need a more accurate list, I think. So I cross out items, rearrange times, barter exercise or sleep or writing, anxious about priorities. Time bites at my heels. And yet I always finish first—always—and, panting, feel not accomplishment but unease. I have rushed (have I rushed?), I have done sloppy work (have I done sloppy work?). A voice in my head scolds, “Until you get better student evaluations, you should not have free time.” But still, the list must be crossed off. I must rush through work so that I can open vast prairies of space where I can float above the grasses, aimless and alone.
But when the space prairies open? I don’t float easily. Always a part of me dwells in foreboding, afraid of both time and its end.
6.
A word about armpit stains. Since high school, I’ve associated pit stains with overweight and generally slippery-looking male teachers. Turns out I am the queen of pit stains. No matter how much antiperspirant I use, if I hit a particular kind of nervousness or excitement while teaching, I can feel the heat rise in my blood, flush my skin, liquefy, and gush out of my armpits. It doesn’t happen every time I teach, but if the lesson relies more on my lecturing than facilitating group work, if I have to go moment by moment hoping the threads of the lesson all weave together, the heat begins and I am That Teacher. And then I wonder, do I make some joke about this and hope we can all laugh it off? Or do I do what I usually do and act like a t-rex, squeezing my upper arms against my body and moving only my forearms?
7.
I’ll think I’m managing, even drawing energy from classes, and then a black fear will grip my heart and I’ll wonder how I can face these students, over and over, all semester, not to mention grading their papers, and I’ll look over the edge of sanity into void and will be terrified and wish I could have a nervous breakdown so that I’d have an excuse to break my contract, pack a U-haul, move in with my mother, and get a job cleaning gas station bathrooms, the kind on the outside of the building that require a key attached to a log so that everyone knows where you are going and why.
8.
I teach technical writing this semester, classes filled mostly with twenty and twenty-one year old men, a few resilient women scattered here and there. They look at me, the men and women. I want them to look at me, but when they do I fumble. They look expectant, and then they look disappointed. The expectation-then-disappointment lasts a week or so, and then they stop looking at me and look at their computers or out the window.
I worry about what I look like when I’m writing on the board. My long, skinny fingers crimp together around the chalk, like a shriveled spider. I know I talk too fast, hurtling toward the end. I know I should gesture more (or less?). I feel my mouth move as I speak, feel spit build up in one corner (something that never happens except in front of a classroom, I swear), and worry it will begin to froth and drip.
Two days before this semester began, I logged on to elion, Penn State’s database for course information, to print out my class rosters. I chose Class Lists, and there appeared my three classes, two with the maximum number of 24 students, and one with 25. Twenty-five? I’m surprised not by anger but by the force of it and how quickly it consumes me.
This is how I flip: keys in hand, nerves flushed and swollen, I walk quickly (my quick steps a sign to all that I will not be stopped) downstairs to the administrative offices and politely ask a staff assistant how an extra person got into my class. “Probably an administrative override,” she says. “You can check with Amy.” I politely thank her, fuming, and then politely ask Amy what happened. “Probably an administrative override,” she says. I smile and thank her and walk quickly (quickly again, see? I’m still enraged) back to my office and there cry a few tears of thwarted justice. The student, who had likely been too lazy and disorganized to keep track of his schedule, had probably whined to the department head about needing to graduate on time and then been given the prime tech writing slot of the semester.
9.
Pre-semester dream: I want to fly. I jump off a cliff and spread my arms but the ground rushes up. I close my eyes, hold my arms above my head like Superman, and jump again. I rise but then get entangled in a mass of thistle-y black space. I can’t see, the thistles sting me, and I am overcome by weariness.
10.
Zen Buddhism teaches me to abandon hope. Cease striving. No job will satisfy because satisfaction comes from within. Be in the moment, absorb it. Have I ever fully occupied the
teaching moment? Haven’t I sped through classes only half-present, later assuaging my fears and doubts with food, sleep, and genre fiction?
Maybe I should inhabit the awful awkwardness. Maybe steeping in it will motivate me, finally, to quit teaching and find a career more suited to my personality and talents.
A friend visited my office yesterday and asked whether I planned to keep teaching. “I don’t know,” I said. “I like the schedule, but even this week I couldn’t imagine having to face students again.”
“But doesn’t everyone feel that way sometimes?” he asked. No, I wanted to insist. I am special in my aversion, unique in my fragile teaching constitution. “I guess so,” I said. Buddhism reminds us that we are not alone in our suffering, that others experience the same dread, the same quivering despair. But this friend is a person who loves students. He gets teary-eyed talking about the ones who will graduate. He takes former students to Eat & Park, he shares his music and books with them, he has more student friends on Facebook than anyone I know. No, I want to tell him. I am not like you. Don’t trivialize my anxiety. It’s like an extrovert professing shyness. “Oh, I’m so shy, really,” she’ll confidently confide to an engaged audience. Really, flakehead? Really? Have you been so conscious of how your mouth looks when you talk that you forget what you’re saying?
Grocery shopping last week, I encountered a former student. I don’t want to see students when I’m by myself. I want to see them when I’m with friends, talking and laughing and being well-liked. Otherwise, I want them to smile and say hello but not stop to talk. If they feel obligated to stop and talk, then I’ll feel obligated to carry the conversation since I’m the oldest, and I’m terribly inept at knowing how long to carry on the conversation and how exactly to end it even when we’re both clearly ready for it to end. Thank God for the cart to stand behind and cling to. I imagine that later the student will pity me, that awkward woman who picks out peaches by herself and who pretends she hasn’t seen you even when you’ve seen her eyes dart your way and quickly back.
Okay, well it was good to see you again is a good way to end a conversation even though it’s insincere. Okay, bye is a good thing to say after that, after we nod and smile several times even as our bodies are turning in opposite directions.
11.
We experience, and then we act, Charlotte Joko Beck reminds me in her book on Zen. If we are self-aware, we can connect our actions to our experiences. I usually know what motivates my behavior. What I have a hard time remembering is that students don’t know what motivates my behavior, and I don’t know what motivates theirs. I need to remember this in the classroom, looking at students who look back glazed, sullen, long-suffering, at those who don’t look back at all.
But I am the teacher. I am their experience. Aren’t they, then, reacting to me? Don’t take it personally. But we are persons in the same room, acting and reacting.
12.
“We may be feverishly engaged in some task and yet not truly focused on the matter at hand. The job may be a means to accomplish some other goal: to make money, to impress, or to prove oneself to another…[or to avoid mediocre SRTEs].” - Thomas Moore
And so we come to lesson plans. Feverish, yes. Focused, no. Goal: to not give myself cause for self-loathing. How much time should I spend on a lesson plan? How much time should I practice it? Other teachers claim they throw together lesson plans the night before or even “wing it.” No one seems to have to rehearse lessons or write out in detail everything they will say and do. So why should I have to? Resentment builds, and time pushes. I want someone to tell me to spend x amount of minutes and hours on lesson plans, to spend x amount of time grading a paper; then I will feel neither worry that I’m taking too much time or guilt that I’m moving too quickly.
When I write lesson plans, I think of the class as one particular student. This representative student makes me especially nervous, harbors (I’m quite sure) anger toward me, no matter how politely s/he treats me. For example, Tim represents my first section of technical writing. He sits far in the back corner in a row with five of his male architectural engineering friends, all of whom are polite and fairly good writers. Once in a great while one of them will participate, but usually they sit in their quiet, conspiratorial row, where I can never see their computer monitors and where, I suspect, they do other work for other classes, politely but firmly giving me only the modicum of attention that they think I deserve. So why Corner Tim? Because he gets the lowest grades (Bs) of the row? Because we are spatially diametrically opposed?
13.
Ally is a small girl who likes her smallness, who seems to want, in some way, to be a kitty-cat, curling in on herself, one foot tucked near her hips, the other twisted under the desk, resting on the metal wires meant for books. She speaks often but softly, butting her head against my shoulder, mewling for the soft stroke. I gave Ally a B- on her first paper, and she padded into my office the next day, crying for explanation. Ally writes all of her papers as letters to her boyfriend, Rich, who is troubled by her vegetarianism and needs, she thinks, convincing. I gave Ally a B- on her first paper because I couldn’t bear to give it a C, not when she’s one of the few students who participates. Ally can’t understand why her paper should follow a coherent structure when that’s not how she would talk to Rich, when he had read the paper and understood it, and isn’t audience the most important concern? Ally drops punctuation like litter across the page. She tells me she writes poetry, as if that justifies her haphazard grammar. I try to explain. I try to present basic principles she might apply to her next paper. I read Ally’s next paper (a letter to Rich about why a vegetarian diet is ideal) with a sinking heart. Arguments dropped without evidence, random quotes from Albert Einstein and Bob Dylan, outside sources presented without citation just after we reviewed citation thoroughly (I thought) in class. Another B- that should have been a C. Ally flips to the grade when I return the papers and crumples in her chair.
Walking back to my office, I see Ally ahead of me, walking a bit crookedly, feet turned slightly in, head down. The sky is heavy, a damp gray. The October breeze sifts through my jacket, and the bark of the elms is dark with rain from the night before. Ally has a headphone tucked into her right ear. She’s deaf in the left, she told me. I pass her quickly, pretending I’m lost in thought.
14.
I would be a better teacher, I suspect, if I hadn’t been such an intense, impatient student myself. So many activities that seemed like a waste of time to me as a student are, I’m learning, important for the majority of students: reading the syllabus and assignment descriptions out loud, repeating important points three or more times per class, answering the same questions over and over. I expect too much from students. I expect them to read the course material thoroughly, to hear and understand something the first time I say it. I expect them to care about their grades, to want an A. I expect them to pay attention even if they’re bored, to engage in the material without prompting. I expect that if I tell them something is important, they will take it seriously. Again and again, I’m flabbergasted when they don’t follow my expectations. I’ve assumed they’re apathetic, lazy, self-absorbed, entitled. But after nine years of teaching, I must accept that most of them care far less about their work than I did and that this is probably healthy. They have richer social lives and priorities other than making teachers like them.
15.
Grading, that bat to the torso, looms. The first papers of the semester are due on Tuesday, and I’ll have to grade 12 papers a day for six days to return them to students in a week. Twelve papers takes me 2.5 to 3 hours. I have planned ahead as much as possible, preparing the next two weeks’ lesson plans, doing laundry, cooking and grocery shopping. But other tasks will inevitably interrupt my grading hours. After the first 2-3 hour shift, I’ll welcome these interruptions. Every paper makes me question my ability as a teacher, every comment I write sparks obsessive mental re-phrasings. Writing a grade on the paper makes me dread the student’s response; will he be overly discouraged or irate? Will I be questioned or attacked?
I question my work ethic. Even two hours seems interminable. Two hours of anxiety, followed by the dread of hours upon hours until the papers are finished. I continually calculate the numbers; if I grade only 10 today, will I be able to grade 14 tomorrow? I hope that my fiddling will reveal a mistake, a loophole, that I’ll be surprised to reach the end so quickly. If I grade 15 papers on Saturday and Sunday, won’t the week be much easier? But after grading 30 papers on the weekend, having to grade 10 papers on Monday instead of 12 seems like a cruel bargain. It’s a terrible physics, a persistent and exhausting equilibrium.
My office-mate can grade 20 papers a day, even on teaching days. “I’m fast,” he apologizes. I suspect he breaks the rules. Teaching etiquette recommends writing at least three comments per page (at least one of those should be positive) in addition to a longer end-note. These comments should help students write their next paper, not justify the grade. But sometimes three comments seems excessive, and comments, I’ve both intuited and learned, must justify the grade. They are understandably inextricably linked to the grade in students’ minds, in my mind when I was a student. Several times students have complained that I gave them a B when my comments were mostly positive. Maybe students don’t register my critiques since I often phrase them as questions: “What is the topic of this paragraph?” “Will audience know this acronym?” “Exactly how much detergent should you add?” To help, I’ve started answering my own questions in parenthetical statements, ie., “(teens who’ve never done laundry will need more specific guidance).” I write too much, trying to err on the side of the clueless and feeling, in the end, like Geoffrey Rush in Quills.
After an elaborate pre-paper-returning speech, I return the papers with only a few minutes left in the class period; I hate to watch them flip to the last page to see their grade. I don’t know where to look when they leave–should I look at them and smile and say goodbye as if nothing has changed in our relationship?
16.
More and more lately, I have a sudden, unwelcome flash of hope that something terrible will happen to a family member, something that will demand I go home, will give me liberty to quit without breaking anyone’s faith in me. I am terrified that I have become so desperate. I remind myself of how devastated I would be. And still, the flash recurs, unsummoned, a glimpse of escape.
17.
I read descriptions of university staff jobs, and they sound hectic: many tasks, many hours, many expectations for not only performance but also attitude. Everyone wants not just my good work but my soul. They will want me to attend company functions, contribute to everyone’s birthday parties and baby showers and retirement parties; there will be secret Santas at Christmas and company picnics and frequent lunch outings or contributions to breakfast donuts and coffee; there will be United Way campaigns and Girl Scout cookies and countless meetings. There will be long, slow hours with not enough to do and there will be days of rushing to get out by five o’clock. There will be the prevailing attitude that wanting to leave on time suggests a lack of commitment. There will be bosses who are completely out of touch with what employees do, and these bosses will, on a whim, add more work or change some policy that will throw the entire office into disarray, and we will all have to pretend to like these bosses and pretend that their changes are smart and necessary.
If I could live with the strain of self-employment, I’d muck out horse stalls, proofread dissertations, and teach yoga. Or maybe I should forego society and build a cabin in the woods, grow my own food, and dumpster dive for clothing and forks and disposable razors.
18.
I may lose my job. We (other adjuncts and I) have been warned of Big Changes, wrought by an entity called the Core Council, who is barreling through the university demolishing programs, “right-sizing” as they call it, to make room for budget cuts. Core Council pulls up its tanks to Liberal Arts next, and the English Department Head has begun calling one EMERGENCY MEETING (sic) after another. After some weeks of suspense, we are given the number 14. Fourteen of us will be cut, in addition to all part-time adjuncts. At the next EMERGENCY MEETING, we are told that we will receive letters on March 18 saying yea or nay.
Throughout this process, I have been convinced, equally, that I don’t want to be fired and that I do want to be fired and that I should just quit before they fire me and that I should ask God for one more year so that I can decide what the hell to do with myself besides teach.
19.
A moment of clarity: What if teaching is, for me, an abusive relationship? Once you see the abuser as he is, there’s no waiting around for a convenient and ethical time to quit–you just kick open the door and leave.
20.
When March 18 looms, it seems most urgent that I NOT BE FIRED. I find myself imagining a future, unfired me enthusiastically throwing myself into department activities and networking and developing cutting edge lesson plans and offering to be on committees and more. Teaching will be my vocation! I will learn how to set up wikis and podcasts and blogs and e-portfolios! I will create fresh assignments that matter! Students will love me! The department will commend me! I will continue to have the summers off and keep my good health insurance!
21.
Perhaps I should just accept that I’m not and will never be a great teacher. I don’t care enough about the material or the students. I’m too awkward in the classroom, too eager for the 50 or 75 minutes to end so I can escape. But I’m a good teacher. I’m competent, organized, reliable, disciplined. I rarely cancel office hours or class. I return papers in good time. I usually manage to strike a good balance between enforcement and forgiveness.
Could it be okay to settle into teaching, knowing I’m not going to be excellent, that I am just going to get through it so I can focus my energy elsewhere? Could it be okay to stop worrying about student evaluations? Might it be possible to enjoy my students instead of seeing them as potential problems?
I watched a foreign film last night, The Band’s Visit, which reminded me why I like foreign films. The characters aren’t obsessed with happiness. They don’t try so hard. They forego expectation and relax into their melancholy. This relaxing makes them open to the world, which, again, doesn’t make them happy. It just makes them open.
22.
My contract has been renewed for another year. I will stay, for now.
My yoga book says that when you’re correctly aligned in an asana (pose), your face will show an expression of serenity; your body is working hard, but the parts are in perfect coordination with each other, balancing and counterbalancing, appreciating the new channels for the breath. Overextending yourself or not patiently attending to your posture will feel like a lot of work and be more likely to harm than benefit. If you do not have the strength or flexibility for the full asana, you don’t curse yourself, feel guilty, or push yourself to pain—you simply modify it until it becomes a pose you can hold with grace.
1.
I have finished making two copies of the motivational bookmarks intended to help me through another year of teaching required writing courses to college undergraduates. This is what the bookmarks say, phrases staggered across the horizontal plane, each in a different fancy font:
Sit with anger, loss, & panic.
Remember impermanence.
Observe. Listen.
These phrases amalgamate my summer reading: Pema Chodron, Charlotte Joko Beck, Thomas Moore, and others. I’ve printed one bookmark on bright yellow, one on cornflower blue, and I’ve laminated both with contact paper. One will mark my place in the course textbook; the other will float from book to book or perhaps be taped on my bathroom mirror.
2.
This is my eighth year of teaching, my first year of motivational bookmarks. I began teaching for my MFA graduate assistantship at Penn State University in 2002, one or two freshmen composition classes a semester for three years. After I graduated, I taught one or two classes a semester in addition to tutoring and administrative duties. Last year, I returned to the English department full-time and began teaching three classes in the fall, four in the spring.
If I’d made bookmarks before this year, they would have read, “If it scares you and you hate it, you should do it.” I used to think this showed a strong character, but now I wonder if I’m just a masochist. I try for a More Positive Attitude, and yet every year I find myself on the same path, carrying my cross into a new semester, a martyr bent not by love but by ineffectual rage (e.g., grading rage, lesson plan rage, dumb questions rage, road rage, sidewalk rage, parking lot rage, ugly office rage, long walks to classes rage, bad grocery-packer rage, too-many-people-texting-me rage, ad infinitum).
I should note that in the summer, when I’m not teaching, most of these rages magically disappear.
3.
School starts tomorrow. I have a Tuesday/Thursday schedule this semester, so I’ll see three classes of 24 students each for a total of 72 students two times a week, for a total of 144 contacts per week, not including office hours. This is the lightest schedule possible. This past spring, I taught four classes of 24 students each, on a Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule. I’ve heard tales of adjuncts at smaller colleges teaching 5/5 loads. I try to be grateful. I try to remember that I’m not alone in my misery. But then I think, maybe I’m alone in my misery. Maybe other people actually enjoy teaching. Maybe they’re digging a trench and finding specks of gold along the way, and I’m just digging a trench. Bookmarks, anyone?
4.
I don’t laminate well. Even when I pencil lines to guide my scissors, I can’t cut true; my two strips of contact paper vary slightly in size, calling for more trimming, greater chance of jagged edges. Now I’m not sure I chose the best four mottos to get me through this semester. Perhaps “breathe” or “abandon hope” would have created the more perfect alchemy for transformation.
5.
If I could only anticipate instead of participate, I’d be in the world’s top 5% of excellent teachers. I love making To Do lists. I like to see all of the tasks written neatly in a column on a blank piece of white paper. I make lists daily, weekly. But again and again, I learn that the real is never so orderly. Again and again, I am surprised and hurt by this revelation. I just need a more accurate list, I think. So I cross out items, rearrange times, barter exercise or sleep or writing, anxious about priorities. Time bites at my heels. And yet I always finish first—always—and, panting, feel not accomplishment but unease. I have rushed (have I rushed?), I have done sloppy work (have I done sloppy work?). A voice in my head scolds, “Until you get better student evaluations, you should not have free time.” But still, the list must be crossed off. I must rush through work so that I can open vast prairies of space where I can float above the grasses, aimless and alone.
But when the space prairies open? I don’t float easily. Always a part of me dwells in foreboding, afraid of both time and its end.
6.
A word about armpit stains. Since high school, I’ve associated pit stains with overweight and generally slippery-looking male teachers. Turns out I am the queen of pit stains. No matter how much antiperspirant I use, if I hit a particular kind of nervousness or excitement while teaching, I can feel the heat rise in my blood, flush my skin, liquefy, and gush out of my armpits. It doesn’t happen every time I teach, but if the lesson relies more on my lecturing than facilitating group work, if I have to go moment by moment hoping the threads of the lesson all weave together, the heat begins and I am That Teacher. And then I wonder, do I make some joke about this and hope we can all laugh it off? Or do I do what I usually do and act like a t-rex, squeezing my upper arms against my body and moving only my forearms?
7.
I’ll think I’m managing, even drawing energy from classes, and then a black fear will grip my heart and I’ll wonder how I can face these students, over and over, all semester, not to mention grading their papers, and I’ll look over the edge of sanity into void and will be terrified and wish I could have a nervous breakdown so that I’d have an excuse to break my contract, pack a U-haul, move in with my mother, and get a job cleaning gas station bathrooms, the kind on the outside of the building that require a key attached to a log so that everyone knows where you are going and why.
8.
I teach technical writing this semester, classes filled mostly with twenty and twenty-one year old men, a few resilient women scattered here and there. They look at me, the men and women. I want them to look at me, but when they do I fumble. They look expectant, and then they look disappointed. The expectation-then-disappointment lasts a week or so, and then they stop looking at me and look at their computers or out the window.
I worry about what I look like when I’m writing on the board. My long, skinny fingers crimp together around the chalk, like a shriveled spider. I know I talk too fast, hurtling toward the end. I know I should gesture more (or less?). I feel my mouth move as I speak, feel spit build up in one corner (something that never happens except in front of a classroom, I swear), and worry it will begin to froth and drip.
Two days before this semester began, I logged on to elion, Penn State’s database for course information, to print out my class rosters. I chose Class Lists, and there appeared my three classes, two with the maximum number of 24 students, and one with 25. Twenty-five? I’m surprised not by anger but by the force of it and how quickly it consumes me.
This is how I flip: keys in hand, nerves flushed and swollen, I walk quickly (my quick steps a sign to all that I will not be stopped) downstairs to the administrative offices and politely ask a staff assistant how an extra person got into my class. “Probably an administrative override,” she says. “You can check with Amy.” I politely thank her, fuming, and then politely ask Amy what happened. “Probably an administrative override,” she says. I smile and thank her and walk quickly (quickly again, see? I’m still enraged) back to my office and there cry a few tears of thwarted justice. The student, who had likely been too lazy and disorganized to keep track of his schedule, had probably whined to the department head about needing to graduate on time and then been given the prime tech writing slot of the semester.
9.
Pre-semester dream: I want to fly. I jump off a cliff and spread my arms but the ground rushes up. I close my eyes, hold my arms above my head like Superman, and jump again. I rise but then get entangled in a mass of thistle-y black space. I can’t see, the thistles sting me, and I am overcome by weariness.
10.
Zen Buddhism teaches me to abandon hope. Cease striving. No job will satisfy because satisfaction comes from within. Be in the moment, absorb it. Have I ever fully occupied the
teaching moment? Haven’t I sped through classes only half-present, later assuaging my fears and doubts with food, sleep, and genre fiction?
Maybe I should inhabit the awful awkwardness. Maybe steeping in it will motivate me, finally, to quit teaching and find a career more suited to my personality and talents.
A friend visited my office yesterday and asked whether I planned to keep teaching. “I don’t know,” I said. “I like the schedule, but even this week I couldn’t imagine having to face students again.”
“But doesn’t everyone feel that way sometimes?” he asked. No, I wanted to insist. I am special in my aversion, unique in my fragile teaching constitution. “I guess so,” I said. Buddhism reminds us that we are not alone in our suffering, that others experience the same dread, the same quivering despair. But this friend is a person who loves students. He gets teary-eyed talking about the ones who will graduate. He takes former students to Eat & Park, he shares his music and books with them, he has more student friends on Facebook than anyone I know. No, I want to tell him. I am not like you. Don’t trivialize my anxiety. It’s like an extrovert professing shyness. “Oh, I’m so shy, really,” she’ll confidently confide to an engaged audience. Really, flakehead? Really? Have you been so conscious of how your mouth looks when you talk that you forget what you’re saying?
Grocery shopping last week, I encountered a former student. I don’t want to see students when I’m by myself. I want to see them when I’m with friends, talking and laughing and being well-liked. Otherwise, I want them to smile and say hello but not stop to talk. If they feel obligated to stop and talk, then I’ll feel obligated to carry the conversation since I’m the oldest, and I’m terribly inept at knowing how long to carry on the conversation and how exactly to end it even when we’re both clearly ready for it to end. Thank God for the cart to stand behind and cling to. I imagine that later the student will pity me, that awkward woman who picks out peaches by herself and who pretends she hasn’t seen you even when you’ve seen her eyes dart your way and quickly back.
Okay, well it was good to see you again is a good way to end a conversation even though it’s insincere. Okay, bye is a good thing to say after that, after we nod and smile several times even as our bodies are turning in opposite directions.
11.
We experience, and then we act, Charlotte Joko Beck reminds me in her book on Zen. If we are self-aware, we can connect our actions to our experiences. I usually know what motivates my behavior. What I have a hard time remembering is that students don’t know what motivates my behavior, and I don’t know what motivates theirs. I need to remember this in the classroom, looking at students who look back glazed, sullen, long-suffering, at those who don’t look back at all.
But I am the teacher. I am their experience. Aren’t they, then, reacting to me? Don’t take it personally. But we are persons in the same room, acting and reacting.
12.
“We may be feverishly engaged in some task and yet not truly focused on the matter at hand. The job may be a means to accomplish some other goal: to make money, to impress, or to prove oneself to another…[or to avoid mediocre SRTEs].” - Thomas Moore
And so we come to lesson plans. Feverish, yes. Focused, no. Goal: to not give myself cause for self-loathing. How much time should I spend on a lesson plan? How much time should I practice it? Other teachers claim they throw together lesson plans the night before or even “wing it.” No one seems to have to rehearse lessons or write out in detail everything they will say and do. So why should I have to? Resentment builds, and time pushes. I want someone to tell me to spend x amount of minutes and hours on lesson plans, to spend x amount of time grading a paper; then I will feel neither worry that I’m taking too much time or guilt that I’m moving too quickly.
When I write lesson plans, I think of the class as one particular student. This representative student makes me especially nervous, harbors (I’m quite sure) anger toward me, no matter how politely s/he treats me. For example, Tim represents my first section of technical writing. He sits far in the back corner in a row with five of his male architectural engineering friends, all of whom are polite and fairly good writers. Once in a great while one of them will participate, but usually they sit in their quiet, conspiratorial row, where I can never see their computer monitors and where, I suspect, they do other work for other classes, politely but firmly giving me only the modicum of attention that they think I deserve. So why Corner Tim? Because he gets the lowest grades (Bs) of the row? Because we are spatially diametrically opposed?
13.
Ally is a small girl who likes her smallness, who seems to want, in some way, to be a kitty-cat, curling in on herself, one foot tucked near her hips, the other twisted under the desk, resting on the metal wires meant for books. She speaks often but softly, butting her head against my shoulder, mewling for the soft stroke. I gave Ally a B- on her first paper, and she padded into my office the next day, crying for explanation. Ally writes all of her papers as letters to her boyfriend, Rich, who is troubled by her vegetarianism and needs, she thinks, convincing. I gave Ally a B- on her first paper because I couldn’t bear to give it a C, not when she’s one of the few students who participates. Ally can’t understand why her paper should follow a coherent structure when that’s not how she would talk to Rich, when he had read the paper and understood it, and isn’t audience the most important concern? Ally drops punctuation like litter across the page. She tells me she writes poetry, as if that justifies her haphazard grammar. I try to explain. I try to present basic principles she might apply to her next paper. I read Ally’s next paper (a letter to Rich about why a vegetarian diet is ideal) with a sinking heart. Arguments dropped without evidence, random quotes from Albert Einstein and Bob Dylan, outside sources presented without citation just after we reviewed citation thoroughly (I thought) in class. Another B- that should have been a C. Ally flips to the grade when I return the papers and crumples in her chair.
Walking back to my office, I see Ally ahead of me, walking a bit crookedly, feet turned slightly in, head down. The sky is heavy, a damp gray. The October breeze sifts through my jacket, and the bark of the elms is dark with rain from the night before. Ally has a headphone tucked into her right ear. She’s deaf in the left, she told me. I pass her quickly, pretending I’m lost in thought.
14.
I would be a better teacher, I suspect, if I hadn’t been such an intense, impatient student myself. So many activities that seemed like a waste of time to me as a student are, I’m learning, important for the majority of students: reading the syllabus and assignment descriptions out loud, repeating important points three or more times per class, answering the same questions over and over. I expect too much from students. I expect them to read the course material thoroughly, to hear and understand something the first time I say it. I expect them to care about their grades, to want an A. I expect them to pay attention even if they’re bored, to engage in the material without prompting. I expect that if I tell them something is important, they will take it seriously. Again and again, I’m flabbergasted when they don’t follow my expectations. I’ve assumed they’re apathetic, lazy, self-absorbed, entitled. But after nine years of teaching, I must accept that most of them care far less about their work than I did and that this is probably healthy. They have richer social lives and priorities other than making teachers like them.
15.
Grading, that bat to the torso, looms. The first papers of the semester are due on Tuesday, and I’ll have to grade 12 papers a day for six days to return them to students in a week. Twelve papers takes me 2.5 to 3 hours. I have planned ahead as much as possible, preparing the next two weeks’ lesson plans, doing laundry, cooking and grocery shopping. But other tasks will inevitably interrupt my grading hours. After the first 2-3 hour shift, I’ll welcome these interruptions. Every paper makes me question my ability as a teacher, every comment I write sparks obsessive mental re-phrasings. Writing a grade on the paper makes me dread the student’s response; will he be overly discouraged or irate? Will I be questioned or attacked?
I question my work ethic. Even two hours seems interminable. Two hours of anxiety, followed by the dread of hours upon hours until the papers are finished. I continually calculate the numbers; if I grade only 10 today, will I be able to grade 14 tomorrow? I hope that my fiddling will reveal a mistake, a loophole, that I’ll be surprised to reach the end so quickly. If I grade 15 papers on Saturday and Sunday, won’t the week be much easier? But after grading 30 papers on the weekend, having to grade 10 papers on Monday instead of 12 seems like a cruel bargain. It’s a terrible physics, a persistent and exhausting equilibrium.
My office-mate can grade 20 papers a day, even on teaching days. “I’m fast,” he apologizes. I suspect he breaks the rules. Teaching etiquette recommends writing at least three comments per page (at least one of those should be positive) in addition to a longer end-note. These comments should help students write their next paper, not justify the grade. But sometimes three comments seems excessive, and comments, I’ve both intuited and learned, must justify the grade. They are understandably inextricably linked to the grade in students’ minds, in my mind when I was a student. Several times students have complained that I gave them a B when my comments were mostly positive. Maybe students don’t register my critiques since I often phrase them as questions: “What is the topic of this paragraph?” “Will audience know this acronym?” “Exactly how much detergent should you add?” To help, I’ve started answering my own questions in parenthetical statements, ie., “(teens who’ve never done laundry will need more specific guidance).” I write too much, trying to err on the side of the clueless and feeling, in the end, like Geoffrey Rush in Quills.
After an elaborate pre-paper-returning speech, I return the papers with only a few minutes left in the class period; I hate to watch them flip to the last page to see their grade. I don’t know where to look when they leave–should I look at them and smile and say goodbye as if nothing has changed in our relationship?
16.
More and more lately, I have a sudden, unwelcome flash of hope that something terrible will happen to a family member, something that will demand I go home, will give me liberty to quit without breaking anyone’s faith in me. I am terrified that I have become so desperate. I remind myself of how devastated I would be. And still, the flash recurs, unsummoned, a glimpse of escape.
17.
I read descriptions of university staff jobs, and they sound hectic: many tasks, many hours, many expectations for not only performance but also attitude. Everyone wants not just my good work but my soul. They will want me to attend company functions, contribute to everyone’s birthday parties and baby showers and retirement parties; there will be secret Santas at Christmas and company picnics and frequent lunch outings or contributions to breakfast donuts and coffee; there will be United Way campaigns and Girl Scout cookies and countless meetings. There will be long, slow hours with not enough to do and there will be days of rushing to get out by five o’clock. There will be the prevailing attitude that wanting to leave on time suggests a lack of commitment. There will be bosses who are completely out of touch with what employees do, and these bosses will, on a whim, add more work or change some policy that will throw the entire office into disarray, and we will all have to pretend to like these bosses and pretend that their changes are smart and necessary.
If I could live with the strain of self-employment, I’d muck out horse stalls, proofread dissertations, and teach yoga. Or maybe I should forego society and build a cabin in the woods, grow my own food, and dumpster dive for clothing and forks and disposable razors.
18.
I may lose my job. We (other adjuncts and I) have been warned of Big Changes, wrought by an entity called the Core Council, who is barreling through the university demolishing programs, “right-sizing” as they call it, to make room for budget cuts. Core Council pulls up its tanks to Liberal Arts next, and the English Department Head has begun calling one EMERGENCY MEETING (sic) after another. After some weeks of suspense, we are given the number 14. Fourteen of us will be cut, in addition to all part-time adjuncts. At the next EMERGENCY MEETING, we are told that we will receive letters on March 18 saying yea or nay.
Throughout this process, I have been convinced, equally, that I don’t want to be fired and that I do want to be fired and that I should just quit before they fire me and that I should ask God for one more year so that I can decide what the hell to do with myself besides teach.
19.
A moment of clarity: What if teaching is, for me, an abusive relationship? Once you see the abuser as he is, there’s no waiting around for a convenient and ethical time to quit–you just kick open the door and leave.
20.
When March 18 looms, it seems most urgent that I NOT BE FIRED. I find myself imagining a future, unfired me enthusiastically throwing myself into department activities and networking and developing cutting edge lesson plans and offering to be on committees and more. Teaching will be my vocation! I will learn how to set up wikis and podcasts and blogs and e-portfolios! I will create fresh assignments that matter! Students will love me! The department will commend me! I will continue to have the summers off and keep my good health insurance!
21.
Perhaps I should just accept that I’m not and will never be a great teacher. I don’t care enough about the material or the students. I’m too awkward in the classroom, too eager for the 50 or 75 minutes to end so I can escape. But I’m a good teacher. I’m competent, organized, reliable, disciplined. I rarely cancel office hours or class. I return papers in good time. I usually manage to strike a good balance between enforcement and forgiveness.
Could it be okay to settle into teaching, knowing I’m not going to be excellent, that I am just going to get through it so I can focus my energy elsewhere? Could it be okay to stop worrying about student evaluations? Might it be possible to enjoy my students instead of seeing them as potential problems?
I watched a foreign film last night, The Band’s Visit, which reminded me why I like foreign films. The characters aren’t obsessed with happiness. They don’t try so hard. They forego expectation and relax into their melancholy. This relaxing makes them open to the world, which, again, doesn’t make them happy. It just makes them open.
22.
My contract has been renewed for another year. I will stay, for now.
My yoga book says that when you’re correctly aligned in an asana (pose), your face will show an expression of serenity; your body is working hard, but the parts are in perfect coordination with each other, balancing and counterbalancing, appreciating the new channels for the breath. Overextending yourself or not patiently attending to your posture will feel like a lot of work and be more likely to harm than benefit. If you do not have the strength or flexibility for the full asana, you don’t curse yourself, feel guilty, or push yourself to pain—you simply modify it until it becomes a pose you can hold with grace.
