The physicality and corporeality of the classroom had never really crossed my mind in the lead up to teaching. Teaching was a mental exercise, learning a cognitive activity. Now, however, it’s the primary conflict in my classroom experience. The mental exertion of lesson planning, activity leading, or lesson planning is certainly present in my life, but at the forefront of my stress around teaching time is how I compose myself. Do I move my hands too much? Do I trip over my tongue? Do I portray uncertainty and a lack of confidence in my movements? Is my body language too cold? Too warm? I look back on the verbal interactions with my students with confidence, but I run my mannerisms over in mind ad nauseum.

Likewise, my students’ physicality has been my primary source of stress and uncertainty as an instructor. I have one student who got a concussion and was medically confined to bed for two weeks. I anticipated making intellectual arguments for the grading contract with my students, but not in wrestling with the ethics of enforcing it in a case of a bodily inability to comply. Now that she’s back in class, I’ve had emails from her about trying to come up with a game plan to get her back on track—but she’s yet to come to my office hours. How do I reconcile the person I see on paper—the way she has intentionally composed herself to me—to the person I deduce from her absence?

However, increased sensitivity to the physical and cognitive capacities has also opened me up to new possibilities in the classroom. This curriculum is certainly very different from my 101 experience and, for a lot of my students it feels very unconventional. After reading the personal letters my students submitted, almost all of them mention that listening-based learning is a weakness of theirs. They all talk in some way about how they learn best by doing and participating and discussing—whether out of sheer preference, or because they struggle with things like ADD and ADHD to remain engaged in a more traditional classroom setting. It’s encouraging to me that the curriculum seems to be engineered in a learning-style inclusive way, and—although personally, I do thrive in a more traditional classroom—it has grown my own understanding the classroom and, hopefully, made me both a better teacher and a better learner.