When I told my friends that I would be teaching English 101, I alluded to it being absurd or ironic as I joked with them, “I don’t know English.” Having moved to Chandigarh, India when I was ten years old and subsequently completing 6th through 10th grade in India, I returned to the States with a deep-seated feeling of unpreparedness. I don’t consider myself well-trained in English, or specifically in grammar and rules of writing. I tend to think of any writing success I have had so far in my life as being a result of passion and a tortured perseverance and undoubtedly from being gifted support by amazing peers and mentors.
Even though I felt I didn’t have the appropriate knowledge or expertise to teach first-year writing, I was somewhat hopeful in that I believed I had transferable facilitation skills. Facilitating political education and media literacy workshops with youth or staff meetings and organizational development sessions with my colleagues over time, I felt I could bring a level of comfortability and skill in handling being in charge of a room. I did my work with key principles that I felt could still apply in a college classroom – a commitment to creating a positive and engaging environment.
Having gone through comp camp and taught my first 3 classes over the last week, I am acutely aware of my learning curve – both in terms of learning what it means to teach a first year writing class and on a more personal note, the monsters within that I still have to conquer to be the teacher I want to be. Murray says:
“If acceptance is hard for the writer, it is harder still for the teacher, for education is geared up for sameness. We want our students to perform to the standards of other students, to study what we plan for them to study, and to learn from it what we or our teachers learned. … They do not write how we expect them to write or what we expect them to write. We are surprised by what they say and how they say it, and we are made uncomfortable by our surprise. And we can make them uncomfortable. And if we do the game is lost. We must learn to accept and delight in the difference we find in our students, for surprise is the most significant element in writing.” (Murray, 7)
I am terrified at the thought of the game being lost by making my students uncomfortable. And yet, I know I am uncomfortable and am transmitting that energy into the classroom. I am aware of the nuance of the work I have to do and that it is not unique to me being a new classroom teacher – but part of some self-work to be the best version of myself – the work of being grounded, embodied, present, and open. I have deep-seated reactions to making mistakes, feeling unprepared/ like it is impossible to be prepared, and to the fear of failure. In relation to what Murray is saying, this is also about how that judgement and evaluation tendency colors the lens of how I approach teaching. My goal, from here on out, is to bring positive energy to the classroom, that makes room for and inspires students to practice writing and experience the surprise Murray talks about.
For me, this also looks like gaining more ease with the syllabus. I am sometimes chasing a finite clarity that I want to pass on to my students and am just beginning to understand the design of the syllabus to be more about process and perhaps experiential learning. The process of trying to work in different genres and mediums and the process of engaging in critical thinking through writing is an approach I am excited to apply. Bean says:
“ … different kinds of writing tasks stimulate different parts of the brain. Kellogg (2008) explains that the frontal lobes of the brain, which seldom reach full maturity until age twenty-three to thirty, are needed for complex writing tasks that require writers first to wrestle with advanced, domain-specific knowledge and then to read their emerging texts from the audience’s perspective. The strain on working memory can be reduced, Kellogg argues, by earlier scaffolding exercises that encourage students to take notes, generate ideas during prewriting, make an outline, or learn the structural features of different genres. These different kinds of tasks apparently activate different parts of the brain.” (Bean, 63)
I think the design of the curriculum has clearly been thought through in terms of the reasoning behind all the projects and the grading system that rewards effort. In terms of teaching, I am learning that my knowledge of how to teach grammar is luckily not so important at this juncture. I am also learning that I need more than facilitation skills to teach this class – I need a deeper understanding and comfortability with the curriculum and trust in myself to successfully execute it.