The following is the letter of reflection I wrote for the pedagogy course I took this semester. The course is required for all first-time teachers. I might have sunk without that class.
This letter isn't long, but it might give you an idea of what I've been doing for the past 2 months while I clearly haven't been writing for this blog. Teaching has taken an extraordinary amount of physical, mental, and emotional energy, far beyond my expectations. Whether or not the amount of energy required will change as I become more comfortable and experienced remains to be seen. No matter what, though, the energy is worth it. It gets returned to me, albeit sporadically and unreliably, from students making brilliant remarks in class and students coming up with just the right way to say things and students teaching me about their interests.
Nonetheless, I'm glad it's winter break time.
Letter of Reflection
December 9, 2010
Before coming to graduate school, I supported myself as a Starbucks supervisor and a Tae Kwon Do instructor. While these may seem like disparate experiences, I found that I enjoyed each job for the same reason: each one gave me the opportunity to teach. At Starbucks, I trained new baristas, helped them with first-time jitters, soothingly explained to customers why their latte was taking longer than usual. At Desoto Taekwondo, I trained beginning, intermediate, and advanced martial artists from the ages of 3 to 65. If only the similarities extended far enough that I could have made mean Starbucks customers do push-ups when they complained.
Neither Starbucks nor Tae Kwon Do felt quite right, though. They taught me that I wanted to teach; the question was, what did I want to teach? English, whether composition or literature, was the obvious answer. I have a BA in poetry writing, read to the point of eyeball decomposition, and talk about words like it’s my job. So why not make it my job? For that, I needed to go to grad school. Coming to UNLV was thus not only a new step furthering my own education, but the ultimate litmus test of whether or not I should grow up to be a college English teacher.
So, come August 2010, the pressure was on.
I began nervously, unsure of how interactions with my students would go. I knew I wanted to run a casual classroom, full of intellectual discussion and aha moments. I didn’t necessarily want horses running wild and/or free, but I won’t deny setting my hopes a bit high. As is my wont, I combated this combination of nerves and hopes through outlandish over-organization. Lists, documents, lengthy lesson plans, and a stuffed 3-ring binder were my armor against disappointment. If I walked into class without any of these things, I felt off-kilter, as though I weren’t heavy enough to be a leader.
Clearly, that state of affairs was too precarious to last. Around Week 4, I began forgetting things. Logistical details that I hadn’t thought through began to go wrong. Collecting 46 writing journals became a nightmarish task involving one very sturdy paper bag and a loss of feeling in my arms. I felt my control spinning away, particularly in the second section I teach.
With that section, I not only contended with my internal struggles trying to balance organization and control with the fact that life happens and things change. Over the course of several weeks, I also realized that the combination of personalities and learning styles in that section would require a different kind of teaching than I had been doing; they needed slow build-up, and firm guidance. The former would ensure that they saw the connections between the different things we discussed, and the latter would ensure that several outspoken students did not sink the discussion.
This was my first big lesson: different classes have different personalities. Moreover, these different personalities have a concrete bearing on how I should best teach. And this leads to big lesson number two: overplanning makes me deaf. In other words, I spent so much time creating and organizing lesson plans and assignments that I never wanted to deviate from them. It felt like a waste. But deviating is the name of the game when real, live people are involved. Luckily, my students were so real and so alive that they quickly taught me to listen to their needs. I certainly haven’t perfected the how of listening to their needs, but I fully acknowledge the need to actually listen, rather than impose.
I could go on for pages (in fact, I did, in the teaching journal I kept this semester), but my penchant for depth over breadth isn’t appropriate for this forum. Instead, I’ll stick with the selective depths I’ve already plumbed, and return to the beginning for a nice full-circle finish.
This was the right choice. Teaching English is the job that all my other jobs have funneled me towards. Some things have changed, though. As it turns out, I’m passionate about teaching composition and about theorizing about teaching composition. That was an unexpected twist whose ramifications keep getting bigger, including (hopefully!) providing me with my first professional publication. I’m concomitantly less concerned with teaching literature. I’m sure I would enjoy it, but it doesn’t seem important in the way that composition does. Check in with me in a few years, and maybe I’ll say different.
But that’s the point. If I should deviate to meet my students' needs, then shouldn’t I also deviate to meet my own?
12 years ago
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