Before I got thrown in the deep end last winter quarter, I did not know what to expect as far as teaching any kind of academic class. The confident, even arrogant, side of me thought it couldn’t be that hard; the old adage of “Those who can’t work, teach” bouncing around with its comforting dismissiveness. The worrisome, ambivalent side of me fretted over what it would mean to be responsible for the quality of 24 students’ education, their focus trained on me like some kind of high-intensity laser beam.  What if I failed in my duties?

The big thing I learned a little too late that winter quarter was that it is ok, nay, even just fine, to not know the answers. The first several times students confronted me with smart questions that seemingly undermined the curriculum I sputtered, turned red and trailed off in my would-be explanation. I had had so many seemingly brilliant teachers/professors and my mistake was in thinking that I could just step into the authoritative role they occupied in my eyes.

“The writer will never learn to write, for the craft of writing is never learned, only studied. But the teaching writer can share the continual apprenticeship to craft with the writer’s students” (Murray 6).

“Of course, you are going to struggle with this reading. You aren’t its intended audience. I’m going to be happy if you understand 50 percent of it. There are passages in it that I don’t full understand myself” (Bean 168-9).

As the two quotes above demonstrate, even though I perceived my teachers/professors as being all knowing they very clearly are/were not. Being at peace with not knowing made me much more comfortable in the classroom. Unfortunately for my students that did not happen until the end of the quarter.