Teaching: Anxiety, Awe, and Excitement.

A good teaching day induces both anxiety and excitement. Both of these emotions sustained today, despite the fact that I didn't step into a classroom once. It's conference week. One of the most important weeks for a teacher to connect to their students one-on-one.

I'm not going to ignore the fact that some days are bad teaching days. Maybe it's inappropriate conduct in class or a plagiarized paper that makes a bad teaching day, or maybe the lesson plan falls through and your students look at you like they'd rather be mopping floors than sitting in your class, or maybe you look at essay topics and think to yourself , My god, what is this world coming to? Yes, those days happen, but when an honest connection is established between a student and teacher (or professor), it's a magical and emotional sensation.

I've been teaching for three years now. When I started, I was more scared of my traditional Idaho students than the women transitioning out of federal and state prison whom I taught through the YWCA in Portland. While those women had the potential to be scary, it was not often in the classroom. I was much more scared of the assumptions and stereotypes I'd have to confront that were imbedded in the minds of my freshman and sophomore students at the University, than the women who'd done time in the joint (though some of them certainly came with their own issues). And while I have bad teaching days now and then, and I have to confront ignorance in my classroom, teaching is the most rewarding thing I've ever done.

Casual conversations with students seem to be the most effective motivator for student success. So many of my students have thanked me for getting to know their name... Their name! This really concerns me. While I understand that some undergrad classes have such heavy student loads that lecture halls need to be packed with students in order for the university to efficiently process students who have pre-requisites, it troubles me terribly that the relationship between professor and student is so distant. How are we supposed to be effective educators when we don't know our students, their realities, their concerns, their interests? I just don't get it.

I set out to really know my students, and admittedly, I don't get to know every single one of them. Some of them are more private than others, and that's just fine. But I certainly try to break through the power structure that assumes I am the teacher and you are the student, therefore you will be learning from me, not me from you. I think this is a false assumption, that instructors cannot learn from their students or that their life experience or specialized knowledge cannot teach a professor a thing or two. I really think that there is inherent value in attempting to level the power structure in a classroom, so that students not only learn from the instructor, but learn from one another. I am also a firm believer that information is not delivered in the classroom (though, sometimes a lecture will have to go that way), so much as it is exchanged. Everybody has a hand in the education process.

And so often I walk away from my classroom excited about the conversations that are happening on very important issues facing my students and me. They have interesting perspectives, they are willing to make public ideas which may not be popular in the broader communities in which they work, they are more often than not very thoughtful of their fellow students. They are willing to research their topics and be proven wrong; they are willing to change their minds, to grow.

This excites me more than anything. The topics we discuss in class are often terrifying predictions about our future, anxiety inducing topics, contemporary social issues, and strained social and political arguments. More often than not, no matter what the political leanings of my students, they are thoughtful with their responses and engaged in civil discourse. And when someone says something that is derogatory or uninformed, often it is my students that speak up and address the issues. Not often is it my job to address the occasional awful thing murmured in class.

Don't get me wrong. Once I year I have to deal with a derogatory term in my classroom, be it racist slurs, ableist slurs, sexist slurs, or homophobic slurs. While it's not allowed in my class, it still happens. And while this might infuriate me, cause my body to unnaturally heat, make my brain tingle and eyes fill with tears of frustration, it's also not often me that has to address these issues, and for that I am proud. My students aren't afraid to call their peers out. And they aren't afraid to do it in class because the tenor has been set early: my classroom is a safe place to exchange ideas, we are not always going to agree and that's okay. You come back to class and realize we are all at different stages in our education, and we hold no grudges when our opinions depart from others in our class. That way, everyone can return to their education without fear.

In conferences there is ample opportunity to get to know students, to know that they are people who have lives, who have lives outside of their education, to get to know their interests and all the things that they are doing to try to ensure an economically sound and stable future for themselves and their family. When they sit down beside me in my office, they become more human. They share their successes and their concerns, even their failures. And in that space where commonality is found in the everyday, a real relationship is established. Students, in fact, are the greatest reward of teaching. Seeing them succeed, seeing them evolve, seeing them challenge themselves and others, watching them navigating this crazy world is so rewarding. Seeing the diversity of human beings up close everyday, is exhilarating. Knowing that we can bridge political differences by a shared interest in bettering our communities and our world makes returning to the classroom that much easier.

But all this gloating, it isn't to say that teaching is easy. I have to be willing to bring difficult issues into the classroom and not just gloss over assignments and how they are structure and what is necessary to get a good grade. My students are not engaged by that kind of curriculum, they want to talk about relevant issues. It's not easy to approach real issues with real people, to listen to and deal with opinions that I do not share. It's anxiety inducing. It's scary to dissect, analyze, interpret, evaluate, and examine right beside my students. It's a job that takes thinking on my feet. I have to be adaptable to changes in collective classroom emotion any minute. It's not easy at all. And sometimes, at the end of the day, it leaves my body humming. Sometimes I hum with anxiety and some days I hum in awe. More often, I leave my classrooms excited than disturbed.

On days like today, my students leave me feeling better than when I awakened. My students and I let our conversations roll over the alloted fifteen minutes we are supposed to spend talking about their essay topics and grades. It's when we talk about their personal experiences or their concerns that I walk away energized. It's when we talk about a student's experience with losing friends to a drunk driving accident, or a student's learning disability, or a how a student's childhood home was foreclosed upon, or how contemporary and more often than not biased media makes certainty uncertain, that I make connections with students. These are the conversations that are important between my students and I. These are the conversations that help me to thrive as an instructor, that keep me returning to the classroom every other day with optimism. They are also the conversations that help keep my students stay engaged in the world around them and in the things that they care about.

This is what makes teaching so damn awesome.